In June of 2021 I left my job as a Senior Software Consultant at Marcum Technology to hang my own shingle here at Techcafeteria, a business I’ve owned since 2007, but have used sparingly. I needed a website, so I found a good WordPress template and threw one together. It wasn’t a terrible website, but it wasn’t the website that I wanted. So, a few months ago, I hired Eve Simon of Eve Simon Creative to redesign it for me. In 2015, Eve was on the team that redesigned Legal Services Corporation’s website. We had agreed to do a two day workshop with her to tamp down the design elements for the new site. What Eve showed up with was so good that we were done in three hours. As that was clearly one of the best experiences I’ve had with a vendor in my long career, Eve was the only person that I thought of when it came to having a talented professional designer do this site.
As per our arrangement, Eve didn’t deliver a full website, just the design – Photoshop layouts of the main pages and a style guide. I dusted off my somewhat dusty CSS skills and did what I think is a reasonably accurate recreation of her design. You tell me!
As someone who has hired a lot of consultants in my time, I wanted my website to have the elements that I appreciated – clear descriptions of what they do and why, with plenty of examples of their expertise. My old site had a blog with close to 300 posts. As much as I tried to make it navigate-able with categories and tags, finding the gems and the relevant materials was a chore that most web visitors would pass on. So I’ve buried the blog a bit (it’s under Thoughts/Posts), and I’ve pruned about half of the posts, but I’ve highlighted the articles and presentations that I think tell you the most about my expertise and approach, and, more important, tell you about the best ways that you can implement technology at a nonprofit.
What I didn’t want was a website that was all about me. This is a company website that is intended to hawk my services, but simply by telling you what those services are, no hard sell. I have no expectation that I’m going to land any business because somebody googled “technology consultant” and found me. I’m not even investing in any SEO. About half of my work is subcontracting for great, NPO-focused firms like Build Consulting and Sage 70. My direct engagements are almost all referrals. So the goal for the website is to be a place where those nonprofits that are referred to me can get an idea of what to expect if they hire me.
I hope you like the new site, and I would be remiss in not finishing this post by thanking Eve for designing the site and Linda (my lovely wife) for approving all of the images and letting no cheesy images get by (except for this one).
