For the last 2 - 3 months I have been working on the design of the new Softduit website.  The heavy part of the work has been in organizing the content and filling in the gaps on the one hand, and building up the navigational structure on the site to rapidly get to that content on the other.

I experienced a bit of a break through this week when I finally figured out through many many experiments and trials and errors how to build a dynamic menu system that would work with many changing pages run on a WordPress content management system.

At various times, I’ve had to start completely over and over again, throwing out the kitchen sink followed by the showers and shower faucets and every scrap of material on the site, only to rebuild and reform it several times.

I’ve been stuck more times in the last few months than I have been in the state of forward progress and motion, but after the break through this week, its all motion going forward. 

Now, I can dive into content organizing mindmaps, fill in the gaps with text and images and start to finish the videos that will accompany most pages.  The fun and the hard work starts now and I am definitely looking forward to wrapping up the new site!

Page Popularity for Site: 20% [?]

My work recoding the primary Softduit website has been slightly stalled for over a week.  The work initially stalled as I took on several important customer projects, was extended as I worked to finish up some personal projects for my wife’s new business, and then extended yet again as I wrapped up new customer projects this week.

Yet, I am hopeful that I will be able to reinitiate my work with the site and finish the new site before too much more time passes.  I have actually had several good weeks back-to-back so my spirits are high due to the progress I have made for others, but somewhat dampened in that I have not made progress for myself.

This might seem like a bit of a contradiction as the work I am doing is for the customers of my business.  However, the subtlety here lies in the fact that once I finish the site upgrade, I will be able to support more customers and support all of them more effectively.  So essentially, much of the work I am doing today is being done with more difficulty than would be needed had I finished my upgrade.

That sense of continued inefficiency is the aspect of this situation that troubles me a bit even when other things are going so well.  To put it into a bad analogy, it would be like a doctor prescribing Phentermine weight loss pills to a weight loss patient a week before providing liposuction surgery.

Page Popularity for Site: 16% [?]

I ran into a set back in the Website Upgrade about a week ago.  I was working to include a dynamic css menu system that would automatically update every time I added a page into my content management system.

I compared several different tools and pulled the trigger on CSS Menu Writer a Dreamweaver extension.

To make a long story short, the software did not do what I expected nor did it do much of anything the way I expected it to do it!

That said after essentially walking through one user issue after the next all week long, by the end of the week, I had figured out how the tool actually works, and I had conceived a way to achieve my goal anyway, even though the software isn’t actually designed to make things such as I wanted, easy.

Fortunately, I have some strengths in working with content management systems and databases, and so I was able to compensate for the software programs shortcomings and still use some of its capability to achieve the same result.  So now, I am back off to the races to work to finish migrating the site over into the new system and make up for the week I lost with the wisdom that I gained.

One of my primary goals is to have the new site up and tuned heavily before August when I will fly out to LA and Vegas for back to back conventions.  By the time those events come around, I want to insure that my website is reliable and make the least of my worries be the search for some good hotel deals.

Page Popularity for Site: 27% [?]

This is probably starting to sound like a broken record, as it feels that way to me.  But I am still working on the new Softduit site.  I am making a lot of progress on the site and I’m mapping out everything I build, while I build it.

I’m finding this to be an extremely useful way of identifying gaps in content, classes, tutorials, tips and tools along the way.  Plus, I’m using a number of the ‘good idea’ maps that I’ve built over the last couple years to fill in some of those gaps.

There is definitely something positive about finally turning potential good ideas into kinetic published content for people to actually use kind of like a travel guide to navigating the internet and building an internet based business..

Page Popularity for Site: 18% [?]

I’m still working to transform the rest of the Softduit website.  Plans and templates are pretty much wrapped up at this point.  Now, I need to convert the existing text on the site into the new system and weed out the text that is outdate or no longer applies.

There’s a lot of good information on the site, but there is some information that is now a bit dated from the days when Softduit focused on selling software and providing direct Business Development services.

The software sales business could not continue when we could no longer offer the best buy on software with MindManager products.  We were priced out of that market.  Fortunately, in the Business Development area we evolved very quickly and specialized in a number of areas that rapidly filled the void.

It was fun working with MindManager as a trainer when development was still speeding along with the product, but as its evolution has slowed down, the need for training on the products seems to have decreased.

Page Popularity for Site: 15% [?]