I just finished up a client project for Prestigious - a clothing line based out of Atlanta, GA. The client wanted the design to be very simple and bold, so I decided to go with a fairly texture-free, chrome look. I really liked the black in the logo, so I wanted the only real black in the design to be in and around that. It contrasts well with the variety of grays used throughout the rest of the design.

The final result turned out a little bit different than this, but this is the version I like the best!

Check out this full design as well as others in my portfolio.

Remember when the only people you were “connected” with on Myspace or Facebook were your close friends? The guys/gals you played beer pong with on the weekends, shared extremely inappropriate jokes with, and felt free to discuss any topic at all with - which in turn carried over to your social network of choice.

Well your idiot friends are still using Facebook. But so are your parents. And your kid sister. And most importantly, your boss (and your boss’s boss).

Sure we can remember fondly the days where it was totally appropriate to post references to reproductive organs on your buddy’s wall. But those days are gone now. We have to move on. Your boss doesn’t need to know why your friends gave you the nickname “jellyfish”. He doesn’t want to see pictures of your drunken weekend extravaganza.

Employers are searching the web to dig up dirt on every new applicant. If it comes down between some polite guy using the default Myspace page layout and you with your “Touch the Rockies” themed Myspace page, who do you think is going to get the job?

But it doesn’t just end with personal responsibility. In fact, making sure you don’t act like an idiot is the easy part. Where it gets tough is when your idiot friends become involved. No matter how many times you ask them to be careful what they post on your wall, they’re going to throw some crap up there every once in a while. So take it down.

Do yourself a favor and be wary of your idiot friends. God knows they’re lovable … but just keep an eye on them.

I’m rebranding MC.com as not only my “personal professional” blog but also my online portfolio for freelance work. Some of you may remember that about a year and a half ago I took a break from freelancing to join a private company full-time. It was a lot of fun, and I gained a lot of skills and perspective, but soon it will be back to freelancing.

My wife and I are moving down to Savannah, GA in January so she can start PA school. I looked around the Savannah job market for a short while, but wasn’t impressed. I feel like I can do much better as a consultant. So that’s what I’m going to do.

You’re going to start seeing a lot more activity on this blog as I start driving traffic and increasing awareness. Hopefully this new design will give me the “wow” factor that a freelancer needs to get new clients interested, but I also plan to start putting out some good design-related content to sort of show off my knowledge of the industry.

There are still some functions of the design that are being worked on. For example right now comments aren’t working. That’s a real bummer, but I’m hoping that will be fixed this weekend. I’m also working on gravatar integration for comments and working in Twitter. So stay tuned!

Yes I know Google Chrome is going to be a minor player in the browser space for a while, especially with such a small elite group of products to compete with. But it’s still just another gold mine app clone that Google developed over the weekend, slapped their logo on, and put up a download site. Thus proving Google’s ability to print money. At this point it doesn’t matter what shitty app they clone and call their own - it will succeed. And Google knows it. Which is why you see so many half-finished products coming out of Google every month. They know people will adopt it due to the logo, and they know that enough people will stick with it through the bugs to allow them the time to polish it while still earning market share and revenue.

Google is just throwing as many darts at the board as it can. And why not? It’s working.

The other point was that if it was unclear before, this should start to lift the fog from your eyes - Google wants to own the internet. They want to compete with every single web-based product. Period.

If Google has ever had a good, mutually beneficial, stable partnership it was with Mozilla and their Firefox browser. Firefox generates $67m per year through Google search. How does Google reward their great relationship with Mozilla? By attempting to push them out of the space with their own browser.

Firefox’s biggest problem is its resource use. Guess what Google is touting as their #1 benefit? It’s lite on resources (even though that’s not really even true).

Sure Mozilla still has an arrangement with Google through 201x (not sure the exact date), but how long do you think that will hold up *IF* Chrome does what Google is hoping and dethrone Firefox as the #2 browser (lets just face it, as long as Windows is the operating system, IE is #1)?

But I digress. What’s the point of this post? Google Chrome sucks. I don’t like it.

My first problem with Chrome was the fact that it doesn’t run on my work computer. I downloaded, installed, powered it up - got a runtime error and a crash. Reinstalled, same problem. Now I could go check out some forum posts, email support, etc etc to find the problem. But this is a fucking browser. If I had just paid $70 for a new PC game sure I’d fall all over myself to find the source of the error and fix it. But this is a browser, and I just don’t care that much. If it doesn’t work on my machine on the first install, I’m done with it.

Now it *does* work on my home computer, so I was still able to test it out. And I have to say, it looks like a Fisher Price toy. It’s funny because I don’t remember Google’s design style to be overboard on “web 2.0″ but good lord does their browser deliver on the gigantic tabs, exaggerated gradients, and endless white space (or rather, waste of space). I want my browser to be compact, fast, and with everything I need a quick click away. Google Chrome fails to deliver on all fronts.

So Google Chrome - no thanks. I’ll stick with Firefox.

Blogger has come a long way.

Recently, Hurricane Hanna was making its way to Charleston and my company wanted a website to communicate how the office was handling it (as the final backup in a line of backups). The site didn’t need to be fancy, branded or custom. It just needed to deliver a message and be able to be updated from anywhere. So I threw together a blogger site. That’s when I noticed.

Blogger has come a long way.

It’s now a viable blogging platform. It’s still simple enough to where any idiot can roll their face across their keyboard and setup a blog, but there are now enough features to keep someone like me interested. I just setup my first real Blogger blog today and plan to update it for a while and gauge the results. I also plan to do a little post highlighting some of the main features of the new Blogger that got me interested in the first place.

This time of year is exciting for me. It’s draft time. Soon I’ll find out whether or not the Cowboys will finally fix their weak secondary or if the Panthers will finally get a decent complement to Steve Smith. But I digress.

With draft time comes the mock draft. The mock draft is as far from an exact science as you can be, but then again so is online business. Predicting the draft is tough, and so is predicting the next big online earning avenue or niche. Here’s why.

Writers try to take in so many factors when coming up with a mock draft to make it as accurate as possible. They look at overall performance, year-over-year improvements, combine numbers, and personality. They take this all over the place data and try to quantify it and put a value on each player.

Analyzing a new online business is similar. Rarely you’ll find specific data that will tell you exactly what you will earn with each site you produce. Sure you can take certain data - competition, total searches (estimated traffic from those searches), growth trend, available monetization methods, etc. But at the end of the day, it’s an educated guess.

Even the pros make big mistakes with their draft picks (*cough* Leaf *cough*). But that doesn’t stop them. They do the best they can with the information available.

They make the call on draft day and wait for results. If they’re good they continue - if they’re bad they cut it and move on.

Food for thought.

But I digress. This isn’t about buyers in general, but about the buyers who are now running what I used to run.

Forum Rank - http://www.forumrank.net

This was my first project of 2007, and probably the most ambitious (at least at the start). The idea behind the site is simple but very complex at the same time. It is a forum ranking system, similar to Big-boards.com but with a much more sophisticated algorithm powering it. The algorithm weighed various options rather than size alone such as average users online at a given time, average registrations per day, etc. It made it so that fast-growing forums could compete in rankings with monster forums.

This project is where I learned that a good product is only about 15-20% of creating a successful website. Despite the work I put into the site it garnered little to no interest. No support. But that’s the way things go.

I sold the site a few months later for a few thousand profit to a British fellow. He hasn’t done anything with it since. A shame.

Net Business Blog - http://www.netbusinessblog.com

NBB was really just an experiment to see if I could dazzle the “make money online” sheep the way gurus had. It worked. People enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how much of a drain it can put on you when the vast majority of your audience is a mindless zombie, buying into any and every easy money idea they can get their hands on. Sure NBB had a lot of quality readers with strong input and a good head. But of NBB’s readers were just DP kids pushing their turnkey sites and CPA scams. So I sold.

The sale went fine (was the most I ever made from a single site sale) and since the buyer had eCommerce experience I thought it was going to be in great hands. Unfortunately the site has grown zilch since the sale and from what I can gather, the income is in the pooper. A shame.

Creep Colony - http://www.creepcolony.com

Now we finally get to a success story. Creepcolony.com was your standard gaming fansite (based on StarCraft). Due to the fact that SC2 is really not going to be very good, I decided to sell. I just can’t run a site unless I’m passionate about it. Anyways, some young fella bought it and man did he hit the ground running.

Since the sale he has totally revamped the forums, had a very successful contest, and seemingly doubled traffic. That’s awesome!

I did more in 2007, but these were the biggest I guess. They’re all I can remember right now at least.

If any readers out there have some more success stories of what has become of their sites after sale, I’d love to hear them!

For now it’s just a blog, but I do plan for this site to be the staging ground for my first adventure into podcasting. I’ve wanted to do podcasting for a while, but this blog just doesn’t seem to be the place for it. I feel that if I started podcasting here it would just turn into yet another “make money online” podcast full of advice that is heard but never followed (hence the main reason I got rid of NBB).

So anyway, if you feel up to it check out Oddball Gifts. My wifey will be posting there a bit too

What Small Sites, Big Money Covers

• Niche research
• Keyword research
• Competition research
• Design & development
• Monetization
• Search engine optimization
• All within the context of building niche minisites

If you’re interested in learning more, be sure to check out the sales page.

If you’re interested in promoting the book please contact me and I’ll happily get you a free copy and help you get setup with an affiliate account. Of course I’m not going to just be giving away free copies, you must have a decently well-read blog, forum, newsletter, or website.