Do Good Design

Luminaries board game

I need more board games. Less TV, more good old-fashioned family fun.

So today’s internet research mission has been five hours (and counting) of searching for a game which includes:

The best board game features

• beautiful, elegant design
• quality pieces — none of that plasticky crap stuff
• stimulating but not too hard (skip Risk/Chess/hugely strategic stuff)
• no lying, killing, or amassing great fortunes

What’s left? It’s all slaughter and political intrigue. Empire building and buying stuff. No thanks.

Board Game Geek

I came across … Continue reading »

What your website looks like affects how seriously people take your business.

Elegant, professional website = Successful, prosperous business.

As I said before, even though I was interested in this marketing seminar, I dismissed it because the website looks awkward and unprofessional.

How can a marketer who doesn’t know how to market herself well online help me be successful?

Graphic design tutorials for more effective marketing

If … Continue reading »

I hear from a lot of people who need to design their websites themselves because they can’t afford a designer. Now I’ve said it before: if you’re going to Do-It-Yourself on your website, you’ll be investing an enormous amount of time and effort if you want to have a successful website, and frankly, you’d save that many times over in hiring a good web designer.

But it never hurts to learn, so I’ve thought about which resources I’ve found to be the most helpful, … Continue reading »

Today I’m thinking about web design mistakes and the what makes a site look amateurish.

This came up when my friend Darcy emailed me about a marketing workshop, “Compelling Storytelling: A Fresh Approach to Marketing“, by consultant Barbara Winter.

Her workshop promises to help small businesses spin a tale that grabs customers by teaching them the art of storytelling. Added bonus? Sunshine in February in Las Vegas.

At first I thought, “Fantastic! A great business website must tell a unique story, weave a tale that folks want to read. … Continue reading »

We get a lot of confused looks and amused smiles when we take our two cats for their daily exercise.

Folks think we’re a bit nuts, but I always get a good laugh out of watching just how much fun Caper and Nutmeg have sprinting across the old school fields, chasing Malcolm and each other.

So I took along my camera and filmed a little cat video clip of our walk today:

Walking the cats video

The thing you have to realise is that in our town … Continue reading »

I learned from J.K. Rowling’s website today that the Celts associated a particular tree with the time of year.

For example, we’re in the Season of Elder (the tree), which spans from November 25 - December 23.

I love trees (on the right is birch — you can tell because the bark peels off like onionskin), so this tidbit of info made my day.

My name, DuBois, means “of … Continue reading »

A large part of what makes something special or magical for me is the story behind it, and that’s why I’ve gone on a quest to discover the story behind Christmas.

It’s a very big story, with a lot of misinformation — especially on the Internet where all the top Google listings are quoting each other without any actual references.

Today I’m just talking about a small part, one of the original holidays behind our modern Christmas.

Peel back the layers of Christianity applied over the 25th of December and what you get … Continue reading »

In the winter of 1880, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived on the frontier of the Dakota Territory, the only house for 60 miles.

The Christmas that she describes having as a girl of 12 in By the Shores of Silver Lake is full of little details, the pattern of fabric sewn up for an apron, the groove worn in the wooden floor — their first time living in a house with wood floors, not dirt, which Laura explains … Continue reading »

Music always helps me get in the Christmas mood, so I’ve been trawling the internet to find Christmas music that doesn’t require you to buy it, register for it, or retch from the sheer cheesiness of it.

But I couldn’t find any. Not one measly track despite Google’s endless search results.

I found myself getting more and more frustrated, thinking, “But I’ve got to write something on Christmas for the blog. I said I’d do a post every day.”

Trawling through those fake websites set up just for selling advertising space, I quickly … Continue reading »

I reread Susan Cooper’s classic The Dark Is Rising often, and this year I’ve decided it will have to be every Christmas.She wrote it when living in America and homesick for England, and as any an ex-pat will understand, the book is a wonderfully romanticized vision of old-fashioned and, of course, supernatural, England.The story is about Will Stanton, the youngest of 9 (or 10?) kids, whose 11th birthday is … Continue reading »