The big news this week is the change to the Bits O' NewMedia RSS feed. While doing some random testing on various feed readers, I noticed that sometimes the articles would show up more than once or the order of the articles would get jumbled. Fortunately, Steven Snell posted an article last week on Traffikd called 150+ RSS Resources that gave me a good starting point. After poking around a little, I discovered that the issue was a bad date format in my <pubdate> tag. If you're subscribing to the feed, you probably noticed when I fixed it because your reader suddenly showed thirty plus unread articles.

I'm in the process of refining Bits O' NewMedia and preparing for a possible redesign in the next couple of months. I'll be sure to give everyone a heads-up on any upcoming changes.

Now, here are the week's five best web design blog articles.

99 Flickr Groups for Design Inspiration - Vandelay Website Design

You Know You're Addicted to Web Design If... - Elite By Design

Create a Brushed Metal Texture in Illustrator - Vectips

Zebra Striping: Does It Really Help? - A List Apart

Piwik: Open Source Google Analytics Alternative - Read/Write Web

The hybrid worldview is the mutant offspring of modernism and post-modernism. It's by far the dominant philosophy amongst designers right now. Its pick-and-choose methodology can make it extremely elusive and disorienting. But it's not impossible to nail down; you just have to have the right tools. In this article, I will be giving a brief summary of the hybrid worldview, how it affects design, and where it's headed. You should be able to read this article alone without trouble, but I would recommend going back to part one, two, and three for better context.

The Basics

As we've seen, the pure modernist worldview attempts to demolish the upper story of reality—the categories of beauty, love, etc. The pure postmodernist worldview attempts the opposite—it denies the lower story where undeniable facts, and overarching truth reside. The hybrid worldview, on the other hand, talks about beauty, transcendence, and human freedom out of one side of its mouth while praising impersonality, survival of the fittest, and  origins of  randomness out of the other.

This worldview can be found just about everywhere you turn. I would say it's the dominant position of modern western culture (sadly, including Christians).  It's also one of the most deadly poisons to the Christian worldview because it renders Christianity impotent without denying Christianity altogether. A Christian with a hybrid worldview will be perfectly satisfied to relegate his or her beliefs to the spheres of ethics and religion. But they will be unable to apply Christianity as an unbroken worldview to all spheres of life.

That's why it's important to educate yourself about this worldview. We must be able to clearly identify it and push its proponents back to their first premises (eg. If you start with impersonal, you can't end with personal. If you start with disorder and relativism, you can't end with order).

Spotting the Hybrid Worldview

I heard Hugh MacLeod speak once, and he said something that I immediately recognized as capturing the heart of the hybrid worldview. In the middle of a talk about shucking the old mechanical way of marketing (modernism) in favor of a personal, social marketing (post-modernism) he said, "We're primates. We love to groom each other. We love to sit around the campfire and create meaning." There's a huge contradiction between this statement and the point he was making. When Hugh refers to humans as primates, he's not referring to the fact that our physical makeup is similar to that of a monkey. He means that we're nothing more than complex versions of animals in every way; and more specifically that our social behavior can be traced to our animal ancestors. Hugh is trying to use impersonal, random, meaningless evolutionary sociology to explain why personal, social marketing works.

This is what Francis Schaeffer called the "irrational leap of faith". It's an irrational jump from natural law to transcendence. In reality, though, our "animal ancestors" do not, and have never, tried to "create meaning", much less sit around a campfire. In fact, human beings are the only life form known to history that has ever built a campfire at all.

I ran across another vivid presentation of the hybrid worldview recently in the film No Country for Old Men (If you haven't seen it, I'll try not to ruin it for you). The story is narrated and framed by a West Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. This sheriff's experiences have brought him to the brink of fatalism—a concept he struggles with throughout the movie. But he doesn't want to believe that every person's actions are the product of impersonal, possible malevolent, forces beyond their control. He's searching for a reason not to believe what seems so clearly true. In the end, admitting he can't deny fatalism, he takes an irrational leap of faith, simultaneously affirming a higher spiritual truth revealed to him in a dream about his dead father.

Again, I'll point you to Nancy Pearcy's Total Truth for more in-depth study of this subject. But for now we need to move on to the consequences of the hybrid worldview in design.

The Hybrid Worldview Applied to Design

I want to start by making it clear that I'm not always in disagreement with the conclusions of the hybrid worldview (though many times I am); rather I disagree with the worldview that gets them there. As I've stressed in the previous three articles, we need to learn to recognize truth wherever it's found and separate it out from the contradictions (Refer to part 1). The Bauhaus school is a good example of a design movement with a hybrid worldview. The Bauhaus school produced some of the most exceptional design of the twentieth century, and yet its worldview is broken. The Bauhaus Manifesto claims of the designer, "In rare moments of inspiration, transcending his conscious will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art." But in many other writings its members promote a completely mechanical, utilitarian view of design.

I'm amazed sometimes at how much truth can come from a combination of the hybrid worldview and a "whatever works" approach to design. In fact, I find myself agreeing with hybrid worldviewers in many cases. They tend to have a goal-oriented view of design which is close to my own. And a lot of the ideas they propose are very down-to-earth commons sense (Hugh MacLeod is actually a great example of this). But upon closer scrutiny, you can see that their solutions have a false synthesis—a false harmony. It's a thin layer of icing on a cake that's been baking for a long time. It may work temporarily but that's only because it's standing on the the shoulders of 2000 years of embedded Christian thinking. Without an overarching system in which both unity and diversity can live and thrive side by side, the hybrid worldview is destined to shift radically to either the upper or lower story. And that puts us right back in the modernist or postmodernist way of thinking.

Moving on to Higher Thoughts

Our general willingness to live our lives according to contradictory and broken worldviews such as the hybrid worldview is indicative of one thing: our utter resistance to God's absolute control. Because of this intrinsic resistance, we are willing to go to great lengths—in fact, whatever lengths necessary—to deny truth. We will call white what is clearly black if it means we don't have to face the truth of an absolute being. These first three articles have dissected and exposed these contradictions in a condensed form. Now it's time to set these worldviews aside and move on to the Christian worldview. If you're already a Christian, you'll be hearing some stuff about your vocation that you've probably never heard before. If you are not a Christian, then I hope the next two articles clear up any questions you may have about Christianity and design.

The legitimacy of web design as a profession is firmly established at this point. But in many ways it's still a vocation in limbo. We're caught somewhere between computer science and art—two fields that have previously been viewed as polar opposites. And specializing in either of them doesn't necessarily qualify you to be a web designer. Some of us work alone managing all the aspects of web design from start to finish. Some of us work on teams where all the little parts of web design process are broken out and divvied up. But in the end we all end up with a similar product—a website. So how do you build up a reputation in an industry that has no real standard—where similar products are being produced by such a diverse group of people with diverse skill sets? In this article, I'm going to list and discuss five areas that require serious consideration if you want a good reputation as a web designer.

Work and Conduct

This is the most obvious and effective way to build up your reputation. The concept is simple: produce excellent work and don't act like a baby. Consistently accomplishing these two tasks will create lasting buzz around your work that will produce clients who respect your talent. This is true whether you're an independent freelancer or an employee. If you focus completely on the quality of your work and the way you conduct yourself in business, you will have a good reputation and you will be successful. You could honestly forget about the other items on this list and live happily ever after. But let's continue anyway.

Web Design Awards

Since there is no official acedemic degree in web design, the next best thing is the web award. But If you're going to pursue this track, keep in mind that it's a crowded scene and there's no real guarantee that winning an award will produce meaningful business relationships or employment. It's risky. On the other hand, it never hurts to have a Webby Award in your back pocket to flash around when you need establish your competency. My recommendation is just to build great websites. If one happens to be exceptional and you think it could win an award, submit it. Just don't put all your eggs in this basket.

Blogging

Blogging is really a no-brainer for web designers. But it's common for us to think that just because we can't do it full-time and make a living on it, we shouldn't mess with it at all. This isn't true. If you work as a web designer, then you have meaningful experiences that other designers could benefit from. If that means posting once a week or once a month, do it. A blog has a multi-faceted effect. First, would-be clients will be more likely to select you when they see you speaking intelligently about your craft. Second, other web designers who benefit from your blog will be more likely to choose you as a collaboration partner for future projects. And lastly, with every new post, you're getting your name out there. It's important to be visible if you want to build up a good reputation.

Online Social Networking

Social networking and social media are big buzz words right now, but they are very important to managing an online reputation. You don't need to be involved in all of them. In fact, I don't think that's even possible anymore with social networking sites popping up every other day. Choose a few that are more specific to web design and stay involved. Answer questions and make friends. Also, make sure that you have a consistent image across all the social sites. Use the same avatar and the same user-name if possible. Help your friends and peers recognize you when they jump from one site to another. This helps build a strong singular online image.

Guarding Your Name

When we hear the term "identity theft" these days, we automatically think about credit card theft and fraudulent loans. But just as common is social identity theft. It just takes one jerk using your identity to stir up trouble online that can severely damage your reputation. There are actually several paid services that guard your online identity but you can also set up a Google alert on your name, user name, business name, etc. to keep tabs on where and who is using your name. It's easy, it's fee. There's no reason not to do it.

This has been a week of PHP and .htaccess for me. Every once in awhile the planets align and a ton of programming has to be done all at once. That's exactly what happened this week. I enjoy programming in small doses; but too much of it make me cranky and irritable. I have to say thanks to my family for putting up with me.

Thankfully, the programming monster has been successfully subdued and next week should be back to normal. In the process, though, I learned a lot about rewriteRules in .htaccess. I think I'll be posting a guide in the near future. In the meantime, here are five great articles from other blogs this week.

150+ RSS Resources - Traffikd

45 Photo Editing Tutorials for Photoshop - Vandelay Website Design

10 Common Mistakes in Redesign - Devlounge

The Evolution of Websites: How 10 Popular Websites Have (Have Not) Changed - WakupLater

ScrnShots in Flickr for Your Screenshots - Read/Write Web

Postmodernism is a dominant force in the world of design. Alongside modernism, it's the most influential worldview affecting design today. As such, it deserves serious consideration by designers of all disciplines. Since this blog is specific to web design, however, I will try to cast my points in that direction. Postmodernism can be a difficult worldview to nail down. The label "post-modern" has been applied liberally to many different philosophies and design movements. This article will attempt to analyze a pure postmodern worldview and its effect when applied to design. In the conclusion of the article, I will present a brief assessment of postmodernism as it compares with a Christian worldview; but the bulk of my presentation of Christian worldview in design will appear in the last two articles of this series.

What Is Postmodernism?

In the previous part of this series we explored modernism and the effect of its utilitarian approach to design. Postmodernism is a reactionary philosophy to modernism. It surged naturally to fill the the upper-story void modernism left. But paradoxically, it grew out of modernism in many ways. Modernism had proposed a system of thought that ruled out the existence of an overarching truth other than a blind natural law. Instead of denying this proposition, postmodernism said, "Fine. If the foundation of truth is a blind natural process, then our sense of reality can't be trusted." In short, postmodernism demolished the lower story of objective truth and presented a completely relativistic view of reality. In the view of postmodernism, reality is whatever is real to the individual. You can see now why I refer to it as a reactionary worldview. It was a defense against modernism's attack on beauty, spirituality, and transcendence. By making everything subjective, postmodernism kept these areas out of modernism's reach. For the most part, modernism declared a truce which has forced many cultures into a broken hybrid worldview where modernism and postmodernism work in a kind of dysfunctional symbiotic relationship. I will discuss the hybrid worldview in the next article, but for now, let's move on to the history of postmodernism.

Where Did It Come from?

As a worldview, postmodernism is relatively new; although the spirit of postmodernism is anything but new. Many of its characteristics can be traced back to the romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and beyond. Romanticism was a reaction to the The Enlightenment the way postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Postmodernism elevates the individual experience to the place of God. In many ways, it's a modern mysticism; placing ultimate value on indescribable, unexplainable, and untouchable experience. It answers the three worldview questions (How did we get here? What went wrong? How can we change it?) by proposing that we came from an unknowable, possible spiritual, force. We messed up when we tried to impose an overarching truth (or metanarrative) on humanity. And we can fix it by throwing off all preconceived concepts of objective truth.

For all practical purposes, postmodernism is agnosticism. I'm sure there are some who will argue that point; but when postmodernism is thoroughly worked out, agnosticism is the only place to go. Unfortunately, I've conversed with quite a few Christian designers who have embraced postmodernism. Most of the time, they are doing it for the right reason—they want to protect spirituality from the onslaught of materialistic naturalism. But they unwittingly put themselves in a situation where they have no reason or right to proclaim truth. Christianity is not modernist and it's not postmodernist; it's in it's own category—a category of wonderful Biblical balance and cohesion, a category of reality.

What Happens When Postmodernism Is Applied to Design?

Postmodernism brought diversity to a world of design that was drowning in unity. In the 1980s and up to the present we see a return to ornamental design and a gradual waning of the mathematical design of modernism.  Recently, marketers and advertising guides have even begun to talk about people like they're people, instead of utility maximizers. These are good changes that should be recognized by Christians. Unfortunately, the final destination of postmodernism doesn't look so rosy.

What happens when you take objective truth out of design? Eventually, it becomes a chaotic, uncommunicative, immoral mass. We've already seen this effect in fine art and in some areas of graphic design. A great example of a harbinger of postmodernism in graphic design is the Dada movement. Although, at the time, it would have been grouped in with the modernist movements, Dadaism was actually a precursor to postmodernism. Referred to by many as anti-art, it followed the modernist worldview out to its logical conclusion and discovered meaninglessness. But in the long run, this nihilistic view of design couldn't be sustained and it was traded in for its next of kin—relativism. Relativism was much more sustainable worldview. This is where we get most of our indiscernible and inscrutable art and design. In the postmodern worldview it's much more important that the artist or designer express his/her subjective feeling than that a work communicate truth to an audience.

• 
  Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

Why Postmodernism Will Fail in Web Design

The reason for the inevitable failure of pure postmodernism in web design is pretty obvious. Our vocation is built around effective communication—remove that, and you're left with nothing. Postmodernism denies the existence of a knowable overarching truth. If this is true, communcation is just an illusion. Postmodernism's chaotic diversity needs to be balanced out the same way modernism's rigid unity needed to be balanced out. Later, I will explain how Christianity provides a system in which both the unity of modernism and the diversity of postmodernism may reside without contradiction. But first, we need to discuss the hybrid worldview. The hybrid worldview takes the best of modernism and the best of postmodernism, mashes them up, and pretends like the two worldviews don't contradict each other—truly fascinating.

Whether we like it or not, people are still printing information from the web. For years now the big question for newsletters, newspapers, and magazines has been, how do we get our printed product on the web? But as these mediums have gradually adapted to become more webcentric, the opposite question is becoming more appropriate—how do we get our web product to the printed page? Fortunately, this is a much easier question to answer than the first one—and one worth addressing. Until recently, I didn't give this idea much thought. But writing for a blog has brought the issue to the top of the list and now I'd like to share the experience I've gained writing a print stylesheet for Bits O' NewMedia.

Setting Up Your Print Stylesheet

If you've never used a print stylesheet, you'll be surprise at how easy it is. Start by copying your web stylesheet into a new css file called, for example, print_style.css. Then, all you have to do is add a new link tag in the head of your page like this:

You'll notice that the only difference between this and a link to your primary stylesheet is that the media attribute is set to "print". If you have this link tag in your page and you select file>>print, the print_style.css stylesheet will be used in the printing instead of the primary stylesheet. When you do this, it's important to set the media attribute to "screen" on your web stylesheet link tag. If you don't, your web stylesheet will bleed over into your print stylesheet and result in some funky and frustrating problems. IE7 users won't experience this issue, but EI6 and Firefox users will.

Flushing the Body Out

We will start by focusing on the body selector. Most of the time, the body of a website will have a background color or image. Start by deleting the background property so the background will appear white in the printed version of the page. Most browsers do this automatically when a page is printed, but it's best to be safe. While you're there, make sure that the color property is set to #000 or "black". Colored text looks great on the web but it wastes expensive ink when it's printed. For now, the last body property you should consider is the margin property. I find that the default print margin is a little too small. Try adding 3em to the right and left like this: margin 0em 3em 0em 3em.

Div-Be-Gone: Reformatting the Layout

Naturally, there are parts of a web page that don't need to be printed. The navigational buttons, for example, have no place on the printed page. Go through your print stylesheet and add "display: none" to all of the selectors that shouldn't be printed. When you're done with that, change the float property on all the visible selectors so that your content appears stacked vertically, rather than side-by-side. You can do this by deleting the float property on each selector or by changing it to "none". Finally, change the width property to "auto" on all page-filling selectors. For example, you may have a div tag that wraps the main content of every page. Changing the width property will ensure that the content in that div will fill the entire printed page. Here's a sample comparison from my stylesheets:

PX is Out... Em and PT Are In

When we build stylesheets for the web, we typically use the pixel or em measurements for all our padding, width, height, margin, and font-size properties. This is primarily because a digital display measures itself in pixels and letter width. On the printer, though, pixels are out. You will need to convert all your padding, width, height, and margin properties to em values. And your font-size properties should all be converted to pt. Also, keep in mind that your nice big on-screen text will look horsey in print. Keep your body text between 9pt and 11pt. Here's some sample code from the Bits O' NewMedia print stylesheet.

Putting It All Together

A lot of this work is trial and error. As you make changes to your print stylesheet, test it out, make adjustments, and test again. It a lot of ways it's a new world for those of us who have focused exclusively on the web. But in the end, you'll learn something new and give your visitors something useful. Here's a screen-shot of a print preview from an article on Bits O' NewMedia. You can test it out yourself by printing this page.

This has been an exciting week on several fronts. I posted my article about the modernist worldview in web design and I've been surprised and pleased by the response. Those types of articles don't tend to do as well on social bookmarking networks but I can live with that. I'm continually amazed by the number and diverse set of readers that contact me about Christian worldview in design.

Also, I've recently started to bring my wife into my vocation more. We are convinced that fathers are given the role as the primary educators of their children. Ashleigh's help in my business will give me more freedom to teach my children. In a lot of way it's scary and different, but we know it's right.

Here's what I ran across in my blog reading this week.

51+ Best of jQuery Tutorials and Examples - Noupe

How to Use Adobe Illustrator to Create a Unique Distressed Text Effect - Devlounge

Website Design and Usability Checklist - Small Farm Design

Web Designers: Attract More Work from Local Clients - Vandelay Website Design

Are the Keyword Research Tools Accurate? - Court's Internet Marketing School

In the first part of this series, I introduced the what and why of worldview development in design. Now that we have a clear understanding of worldview and its elementary parts, we will move on to analyze three common worldviews. In this article we will be considering the modernist worldview—what it is, where it came from, and its practical consequences in design. The purpose of these critiques is to demystify the ideas we encounter every day in design. When we know how to extract worldview from high-sounding design philosophies, they lose their mystique. Our minds are then liberated to apply a holistic Christian worldview. After deconstructing modernism, we will move on to postmodernism, and then the common hybrid worldview.

What Is Modernism?

In its simplest form, modernism is a worldview that elevates human reason to the place of God. It proclaims objective truth in science alone and finds this truth immanent in every facet of existence. Sola physicum gloria, one might say. Modernism always starts with a materialistic explanation for humankind's origin. This is how it answers the first big worldview question—how did we get here? The answers to the second two questions (What went wrong? How do we fix it?) vary quite a bit from modernist to modernist. Fortunately, it's the answer to the first question that impacts this worldview the most. We will discuss that impact but first we need to take a look at the history of modernism—although I suppose "history of modernism" is somewhat of a contradiction.

The Origin of the Modernist Worldview

To understand modernism, we must start by looking back to the spirit of the 19th century. In the first half of the 19th century, the industrial revolution was mechanizing tasks that only humans had been able to perform up to that point. New scientific discoveries were rocking the foundation of our understanding of the world. Naturalism was on the rise. Rationalism was trouncing the ground that been cultivated by the renaissance and the romantic period. All these changes were the churning stew that became modernism. In 1845, the most influential writing of modern times cut the final chain holding modernism back and unleashed a flood on the world. I'm speaking, of course, of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. Darwin proposed a feasible mechanism by which the origin of life could be explained without the need for an all-powerful God. The effect of Darwin's new theory rapidly spread to the major spheres of human life. Unified naturalistic philosophies were developed by philosophers such as Neitzsche and Rousseau. The core unit of civilization, the family, was reconsidered. Governments were realigned. In essence the whole world shifted gears. And, of course, design was was changed to match the modernist worldview.

Modernism Applied to Design

The modernist worldview inspired a number of important and lasting changes in design. Although principles of functional design had been developed in classical Greek and Roman cultures, the renaissance had focused almost exclusively on aesthetics. Modernism, with its mechanical view of he world, revived the definition of design as a functional discipline. Modernist graphic design movements began gradually stripping away the purely ornamental aspects of their designs to lay bare the functional essentials. Their perception of beauty was found in grids, in unity, and in mathematical symmetry. Piet Mondrian, possibly the greatest voice in early modernist design, once wrote that art would "disappear in proportion as life gains equilibrium". By this he meant that man's evolution would eventually render aesthetics obsolete.

• 
  Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red, 1921, oil on canvas, 72.5 x 69 cm, Tate Gallery. London.
• 
  Black Square, 1915, Oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg

It's also interesting to note that the modernist worldview tended to have the same affect on design movements even when they developed in isolation. For example, the early Russian constructivist designers had no contact will their fellow modernists in the futurist and de Stijl movements, but similarities in their design styles are uncanny. That's not to say that worldview is the only factor in style development, but I think it illustrates that it can, in fact, affect it.

The height of modernist design occurred somewhere in the middle of its progression toward purity. As long as a vestige of transcendent beauty was left in modernist design movements, they did very well. But as they moved toward their ultimate conclusion in design, ironically, the design that was built on rationalism became less and less rational. I consider the point of modernist despair to be embodied in the work of Kasimir Malevich in which a pure black square on a white canvas is presented as the ultimate representation of design.

Today, there are very few pure modernist designers. But we still see the effect of their design philosophy everywhere we turn. Anytime we talk about grids, or symmetry, or white-space, or functional design we can thank the modernists for their contribution to our work. What the modernists taught us (unintentionally, I'm sure) is that there is real beauty in order. Their commitment to function and unity produced some very inspiring works. As Christians we have to be able to recognize these good qualities and separate them from the destructive worldview behind them. In the end, the problem with the modernist worldview is the same as the problem with most worldviews—you can't live it, not really. When you work it out thoroughly and apply it to every area of life, it doesn't work.

The Gaping Hole in Modernism

The modernist worldview ultimately fails because it denies basic aspects of humanity that have been embedded by God. A world in which utility, function, and unity are the only truths can be proposed in theory; but it doesn't work in reality. Humans were designed to enjoy and create beauty, to love and be loved, to appreciate diversity. When these integral parts of our being are written off as illusion, the utility and function that modernism elevates so high begins to break down. The transcendent concepts that modernism denies actually support the utility and function that it so loves (or prefers, I should say). This creates an irreparable break in the thought system of the modernist worldview.

Postmodernism to the Rescue

There was, of course, eventually a backlash against the utilitarian design of the modernists. It turns out, people don't like to live in concrete jungles and drab surroundings. In the wake of the revolt, postmodernism quickly moved in to fill the gap. It takes almost the exact opposite approach to design as modernism. Reviving the spirit of romanticism, it holds all truths as completely subjective—the product of individual taste. There is no overarching truth or meta-narrative. Postmodernism is the subject of the next part in this series.

In the past few years, many traditional businesses have started focusing on their website as the primary point for communication and marketing. And it's not surprising; the depth and efficiency that is gained by a well developed website is hard to ignore. At the same time, though, I've found that many of the same business owners and marketing departments are hesitant when it comes to setting budgets and spending time. They've rationally made the switch to web-driven marketing, but the familiarity of the old habits are too ingrained to just drop off and die without a fight. That's where we come in to do battle for our clients. It's a place where we can improve our client's business and increase our own business at the same time. This article is a step-by-step guide to positioning yourself for the victory.

1. Start off strong

Every time you start a new project, you should be continually pointing your clients the future—casting a vision for the new site, discussing possible future expansion, presenting success stories from similar companies. It's important to spur your clients on to aim higher than they already are. The fact that they called you in the first place shows that they place some value on your services. But chances are, they have no idea just how valuable those services can really be. It's your job to point them to that reality.

2. Return to the scene

One month after any new site goes live, call the client and ask for input: Has anyone commented on the site? Are visitors able to get around it easily? Is there anything that isn't working the way we thought it would? These are the types of question you should be asking. And you shouldn't be asking them for the sake of smalltalk—you're looking for real input that will help you fine-tune the site. Sometimes the changes will be big, sometimes they will be small. Just make sure you allow room in your estimates for this part of the project.

3. Return to the scene again

After six months, you need to prepare an evaluation of the site's performance and present it to your client. Make sure to include a clearcut plan that explains where the site is strong, where it is weak, and what you suggest to improve it. This step will require that you have good hit tracking software installed on the site. A combination of Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and Clicktale should do the job. At this point, you're well beyond the scope of the original project and you should be billing for any changes that are okayed at this presentation.

4. ...And again, and again

Starting to notice a trend. It's easy for companies to forget that websites are growing, changing entities. It's crucial that you continue to return to improve your original product and keep your services at the forefront so they won't be overlooked when budgeting time comes. Checking in at least every six months is a good rule. Larger clients may require even more frequent calls. Every year and a half to two years, you are safe to suggest a major design overhaul or technology upgrade.

It can be difficult to follow these rules. Sometimes after I'm finished with a project, the very sight of the homepage makes me want to heave. But if I take it easy and just push through, I can usually do the right thing for my clients and myself. I just have to remind myself that this is God's process for improving and molding me.

This week marks the beginning of my six part series on worldview in web design. I had planned to start it up several weeks ago but I felt that it needed a little refining. My wife and I spent quite a few evenings in the last month discussing points and researching topics after the kids were in bed. Looking at the final product, I think the labor was well worth it. I'll be posting a new part in the series every Wednesday for the next five weeks. And now... 5 for Friday.

Logo Design Basics: The Five Types of Marks - Positive Space

Free Analytics Suite Coming From Yahoo! - Read/Write Web

63 Impressive Website Background-Images: Trends,  Resources, and Tutorials - Noupe

Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks - Smashing Magazine

Create Abstract Backgrounds in Illustrator - Vectips