JohanvanSeijen

So much to do, so little time…

Johan van Seijen — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:21:01 +0000

Almost everyone will know the familiar feeling of having too much to do in too little time. The past few months have been hectic to say the last. Me and my partner have jumpstarted an internet company spitting out one fullblown CMS a week. While the site your looking at was designed and built over the course of two months, with the help of a multisite WP installation, prefab templates and a slew of plugins managed to cut that time just a couple of days.

Well that’s great and all, but I lost focus nonetheless. Focus on what drives me at work. Some of it is working harder, faster, more efficient etcetera, but at a certain point I got tired of the chase while losing the joy of the ride itself. The more experienced I get the more cliches have may as the main protagonist. Funny.

Business Card NexusStudios.nl

Johan van Seijen — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:22:55 +0000

After having our second customer for our new company NexusStudios.nl I decided it was time to create a business card. I’d actually finished a business card design for a client of mine so I already was in the business card mindset. Compared to the business cards I’d actually received in my life, the ones I saw on the internet filed under “best business cards” raised the bar significantly. Not wanting to spend too much time (meaning a couple of hours), I decided to create a foldable, double sided card supporting our business’ core expertise of webdesign.

The result

Business Cards Eyecandy

New website: WOZwaardeinfo.nl

Johan van Seijen — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:56:57 +0000

Made a redesign of the wozwaardeinfo.nl site. Trying to have an output of one site per week, this one is the fourth installment. I call it my “white hat link farm” principle. Building upon the strongest of SEO principles: link building, I decided the best thing would be to create my own cluster of sites all linking to each other in certain forms. The structure of the website is a main navigation followed by a nivo-slider and three content blocks. In my oppinion it’s the structure most strongly supported the “don’t make me think” call-to-action motto.

Business Cards Sportlink

Johan van Seijen — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:47:29 +0000

Finished the graphic for a set of business cards. To add a little graphic twist I put the cards on a virtual wooden desk emphasing the transparency of one of the cards. It’s difficult to create a sense of texture commonly used in business cards with an Illustratro design but the wooden background creates a sense of depth and realism without too much effort. The client has chosen the blue over the white one.

Business Card Designs

New website: GoudenGoud.nl

Johan van Seijen — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:01:17 +0000

After buying the SEO tool Market Samurai and playing around with it a bit, we thought of making the site GoudenGoud.nl with the sole purpose of making money with the help of Adsense. I designed a completely over the top site where people would be able to find buyers of their gold. Our little experiment has already yielded almost 10 dollars, which is a ridiculous conversion rate considering the minimum amount of traffic of several dozens we’ve had. Our completely optimized site is ascending the SEO tree, going from spot 133 to 71 in a mere two weeks. I’m wondering where we’ll stand in one year.

New website: NexusStudios

Johan van Seijen — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:31:11 +0000

It’s kinda stupid when you sell websites but you don’t have a website yourself. Common practice is to put your credentials in the footer of every site you make, but we didn’t have a site to link to. It was one of the main reasons I created our corporate website NexusStudios.nl. Besides this site it’s a site where I would like to spend more time on because I feel there are still things missing. For instance the logo doesn’t have that unique feel I personally ascociate with design, but in the end it has already brought us our second customer so I don’t complain (too much). By now it’s obvious to me that my favorite color is blue.

Flyer Sportlink

Johan van Seijen — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:08:08 +0000

As an extension to their corporate identity I designed a flyer for Sportlink. This flyer would be added to a goody bag visitors would receive at the start of a certain convention. The Dutch description reads “Your sportsadministration is given a headstart with Sportlink Club”. Sportlink provides sports software to Dutch associations.

Flyer Graphic Design

Creating a Corporate Identity

Johan van Seijen — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:24:41 +0000

After I had designed the look and feel of the Sportlink website, I got a request to further deepen the corporate identity beyond just a website. They would need something catchy for an advertorial. I had tinkered with the silhouettes in the logo of Sportlink and after some deliberation decided to go all out with them. The result you can find below. Suffice to say the people at Sportlink were pleased with what I came up with.

Advertorial

Splashscreen Website Portal

USB stick

Lynda Learning Curve

Johan van Seijen — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:45:01 +0000

I once was a illustrator for fashion magazines. Now I work part-time at a small company where very recently my job title changed into “senior web designer”. I’ve always been a little envious of people knowing all kinds of software programs. They put me out of business as an illustrator because I just couldn’t keep up with the Photoshop and Illustrator designers working ten times as fast as I did with my manually drawn illustrations.

Then during the credit crunch I got fired from my day time job as a software tester because those things just happen sometimes I guess. Next thing I worked for a small software firm and I decided I would change my professional life. Here’s how: I developed an efficient learning strategy.

Come up with your own learning strategy

I very often said to a colleague of mine.

Don’t work harder, work smarter.

Working hard will be necessary to acquire your own financial freedom, if that’s what your after, but working smart is choosing the right path to run. I also like on of Jim Rohn.

Work harder on yourself than on your job.

A lot of people, and I do mean a lot, are NOT happy with their jobs. That’s why Jim Rohn’s golden rule of self development is so important. Now you might wonder what all this mumbo jumbo might mean to yourself, but when I found my learning strategy I found a way to becoming a “senior web designer” within half a year. It involved incorporating 15 days of video material into my Itunes library from Lynda.com. Lynda.com is a fantastic website, where you will be able to find every software program imaginable turned into highly effective screencasts, greatly reducing the learning curve for traditional giant software products.

These are the ones I got and actually looked at. Some many times

Adobe After Effects CS4 Essential Training
Adobe AFter Effects CS4 Beyond the Basics
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS Essential Training
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Navigation with CSS
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 and WordPress 3
Adobe Illustrator CS4 Fundamentals
Adobe Illustrator CS4 Advanced
Adobe Illustrator CS5 Mastery
Adobe Indesign CS4 Essential Training
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Fundamentals
CSS for Designers
CSS Positioning Best Practices
CSS3 First Look
Google Analytics Essential Training
Google Website Optimizer Essential Training
Joomla! 1.5 Essential Training
Joomla! 1.5 Creating and Editing Custom Templates
Joomla! 1.5 Advanced CSS
Joomla! 1.6 Essential Training
Joomla! 1.6 Creating and Editing Custom Templates
JQuery Essential Training
Search Engine Optimization
SEO: Search Engine Optimization Getting Started
Stompernet (not Lynda.com)
Stompernet 2.0 (not Lynda.com)
WordPress 3.0 Essential Training
WordPress 3.0 Creating and Editing Custom Themes

Watch it, learn it and become a senior web designer yourself. It’s that simple.

Search Engine Optimization revisited

Johan van Seijen — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 21:51:35 +0000

The last couple of months I’ve worked on the site that should make me financially independent within half a year. Now I’ve been putting myself on the Google SERP’s as a design guru but this is something else, even I admit that. But it was only after I stopped messing around with SEO and had a real hard-nosed look at my attempt at getting some traffic that some much needed lessons were learned about SEO anno 2011.

The true grit of SEO

As much as I didn’t want to admit, search engine optimization is about the long run. Ever since I ran into the Stompernet courses, thinking I’ve found the holy grail of web-marketing, I found out that things are not as easy as they seem. The Stompernet courses do provide the interesting newbie with the mindset of an SEO expert. The two courses, Stompernet and Stompernet 2.0, roughly amount to 45 hours of videos, screencasts, lengthy discussions and more. Eager as I am, when the next golden opportunity comes my way, I voraciously devoured the material within two weeks, and then went for a second round.

It was at the time I started this website and I happily went for some on-page optimization, crowning myself the next software design guru of the world. But when I tried to apply some of the other tactics, they failed miserably. Admitted the Stompernet courses are already kinda old, like 2005 and 2008, and some of the material just doesn’t cut any mustard nowadays (if that’s not a traditional saying I apologize).

The social media community: SEO for the 21’st century

It was when I started my own company, a need for some quality SEO really dawned on me. It was then I started to realise again, shortcuts in life are very rarely handed out to you and it will be no different with SEO. Getting ranked easily and making money with banner ads fails very often, because of it’s inherent egoistic outlook. It’s the visitors to your site that count and they will bring you the love of Google. By linking to you in a very natural way, to your natural content.

For my own company I envisioned myself at the forefront of several web communities, thriving on the notion of user generated content. Energetically connecting people in news ways, on every digital platform we can imagine. Face to face intense relationships in whatever form does not mean we have to be able to physically touch. Old ways of doing business are slowly giving way to new ones, where the vision of a digital world truly enhances the physical one. The hard and fast ways of now defunct SEO tactics will give way to quality link building in the truest sense of the word: connecting people and adding value to their lives. Whether it’s people buying pink Crocs or sending each other a digital holiday card, the focus on an interpersonal connection is the start of a very strong business case when it comes to any form of e-commerce.

SEO evolution

In my mind SEO has evolved to the form where people themselves have to interact on the platform you build. Blog platforms have always been a good place for this and Google has rewarded them warmly. Yes old tactics can have their place but as Stephen Covey put’s it, it’s interdependance that’s the next step from independence. It’s what we can provide for each other instead of for ourselves that will pave the way to life’s riches.