That's Neat Organizing Relaunch

Elizabeth and I recently decided to retire the website I lovingly hand-crafted when she started her organizing business over 10 years ago.  It was a good site: simple, easy to navigate, got the point across effectively; Elizabeth has received many compliments about it over the years.

However, the time had come to do something major with the site - it had grown over time to meet the needs of the business, and a number of major features had been tacked on (including a blog and a spot dedicated to videos and other media). I created the site in a time when mobile web browsing was not all that common, and the site was difficult to navigate on a tablet or a phone. I also have to admit that it was looking dated compared to other small-business sites that Elizabeth admired.

The first thing to consider was whether or not to code a completely new custom web site. Our discussions about this surfaced a number of problems which we had over the years:

• The custom site was impossible for Elizabeth to update herself, making me the single point of failure. Any time I was making updates to the site, I was not doing something else, like paying bills or fixing plaster walls. Elizabeth didn't feel like she should have to learn how to use Visual Studio in order to make a minor site update.  Adding the blog helped, but she wanted to have some more control in the look, feel and content in the rest of the site. 
• Maintaining a custom site means you have to worry about version control, backup, etc. These things have gotten easier in the 10+ years she has been in business, but it was another important task that she had little control over, and was my responsibility.
• I also had to worry about breaking changes occurring in site code when the hosting company pushed upgrades to the server hosting thatsneatorganizing.com. I remember this happening on the site when the .NET framework was upgraded a couple of years back.

The main result of talking this out made us realize that Elizabeth wanted to take a much greater role in the maintenance and content of the site, which led us to consider a number of SAS Website hosting companies.

I was floored at the capabilities of some of these offerings; all of the major sites we looked at had web based WYSIWYG site creators with integrated responsive design templates, blogging capabilities, etc. A lot different than when she started her business.

We ended up selecting Squarespace as the new hosting company and couldn't be happier.

Reflections on the Job Hunt

I've been busier these last couple of weeks than I have been in a long time. Looking for employment is an all-consuming set of tasks.

Finding a job is like starting a small consulting firm combined with multiple final exams. You are responsible for sales, marketing, public relations, copy writing, and product development. If you're interviewing for a technical position, you also need to have nearly instant recall of diverse bits of arcane information and have the ability to make comprehensive oral arguments demonstrating your mastery of the topic, much like a member of a debate team.

However, when you get down to what makes a successful job hunt, it is very much like what makes a successful sales representative (my first job after graduating from Drexel was in outside sales). The more companies that you contact increases the number of interviews you will be invited to. The more interviews you attend, the more polished your "why you should hire me" message becomes.

Like hitting a baseball or riding a bicycle, becoming a good interviewee requires lots of practice. By the time you get an offer, you'll be presenting yourself and your experience in a confident and professional manner. If you're looking for a job, get out there and make some calls today!

Resources:
I've found a number of free resources that have helped me in these first couple of weeks. Not surprisingly, they are all provided by Google. You will need to sign up for a Google account in order to use any of these.

• I had been sitting on this domain for a long time without doing anything with it. I did not want to use my ancient Yahoo! mail account for this job hunt, so I began researching inexpensive options for hosting and email. I was pleasantly surprised at the comprehensive set of utilities Google Apps provided me with. I am using them for hosting, a customized start page, email (just like GMail), and documents/spreadsheets. An additional bonus is that I am getting all of this for free using the Standard Edition. There is also a paid Premier Edition level of service, which has additional options such as extra email account storage space.
• After I configured my DNS settings to have iangoodsell.com work with Google Apps, I pointed this blog (hosted by Blogger) to a custom URL at iangoodsell.com. This was very easy, and gives my blog an easy to remember address. Instructions on how to do this with your Blogger blog are here.
• There were approximately 70 members of our technical staff effected by the layoff. Fortunately, one of us was forward-thinking enough to set up an invite-only Google Group that we have all been sharing information on - posts to recruiters and job leads, documents, resources. I have been very impressed with Google Groups, it's like SharePoint's little sister. It is also free.
  

Don't run production ASP.NET application with debug="true"

Microsoft's Scott Guthrie has a great post on the obvious (and sometimes not-so-obvious) reasons why you really, really don't want to do this, as well as how to change your server's machine.config file to prevent this from accidentally happening.

Read it here.