Launched a new site this past week for Flats Organic Pizzeria in Worcester, MA. They’re a one location outfit right now, but they’re looking to aggressively epxand over the next few years. They saw our work with b.good and contacted us because of it. It’s nice to get a referral that comes directly from the work you’ve done. It validates what you’ve been doing.

So while we work already with a few restaurants, we signed Flats up as our first official oRestaurantdesign.com customer. Hopefully we can help Flats achieve the success they are looking for. For now though if you’re in the area you should go check them out. Their food is all from local and organic sources, and they have a SLO policy (Sustainable, local, organic). It’s already getting raves.

Check them out!

http://flatsrestaurant.com

I’m gonna copy a post from OrcaPack.com

http://orcapack.com/new-website-focus-products

We’ve launched our new website for OrcaPack at orcapack.com to focus on our new targeted website products. We’re starting with oClubhouse, oDaycare, and oFitnessclub.

Since our inception in 2002 our company has undergone a number of radical changes. We started out as a product company making a specific product, then as a website design and service company, then catering to specific industries, then back to general. We’ve been all over the map, whatever needed to be done on the web, we did.

This is a new chapter though. One where we’re moving into working on our specific products.

All these products focus on specific industries. The idea is that instead of having web design be a service, we have it be a product that someone buys a subscription to. It’s like leasing a car versus buying.

When you buy a car you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new car. Let’s say you get a semi-decent new car for $30,000. You get certain warranties with a car, that it’ll keep working and the like, but the car itself doesn’t improve. A few years later the newer models make yours look kind of grungy. You don’t have the latest GPS system, or DVD Video in the back for your kids. The doors don’t slide open automatically, the seats don’t store in the floor, whatever. Plus it’s just looking a little dingy and dirty. The car manufacturer will be happy to help and build you a new car for $30,000 or more given inflation to get those new features.

Not to mention that all along you had to pay for gas by yourself, clean it yourself, drive it yourself.

It’s the same thing when you buy high quality websites. You’re spending 10,000, 20,000 or more, sometimes significantly more, to build a website with a high quality design, specifically architected for you and your industry, but as soon as it’s handed to you, the responsibility of the designer is done. If a month after it’s finished you see some cool new thing, well… It won’t be on your website, unless you pay extra. If after a year you don’t like how the site looks it’s going to cost you thousands more to redesign the site.

That’s why what we’re offering is more like leaseing the car. You pay a low rate per month and you get the same site as if you had paid tens of thousands of dollars. We maintain the site for you. We keep it clean. We update it, make sure it’s patched and secure. If a new feature comes up that is applicable to your industry we add it. Every month the ‘car’ is new, fresh off the lot. You get a current, technologically up to date, well maintained site, that looks good, and is architected specifically for your industry for a low price.

The three industries we’re focusing on initially are membership clubs, organizations, and the like with oClubhouse; fitness clubs, althletic clubs and gyms with oFitnessclub; and daycares, preschools, and early learning centers with oDaycare.

oClubhouse focuses on membership clubs and organizations. One of our flagship subscribers is the Publicity Club of New England. Whether it’s a local professional club, or a college alumni club, etc. Groups that need to have an active membership with many social ties. Groups that need to get new members to find them and join and sign up (and pay dues!). Clubs that have events and need to sell tickets to their members. oClubhouse focuses on providing a basis for these groups to bring in new members, get those members to participate in your club, both at your real life events, as well as online, and to generally be a sucessful club.

oDaycare focuses on daycares, preschools, and learning centers. One of our flagship subscribers for oDaycare is First Step Childcare Center. Whether you’re a daycare, preschool, or some type of early learning center we can help you. oDaycare focuses on these businesses, to better help you get new students, to keep your own parent/clients happy, and make it easy for people to find you. In addition we’re partnering with a number of services so that not only can you have a basic website, but easy setup to provide secure areas for your parents to view video within your center, post secure pictures online, etc. For far less than the cost of one student a month you can help fill your center to capacity by using oDaycare.

oFitnessclub focuses on fitness clubs, athletic clubs, and gyms. One of our flagship subscribers for oFitnessclub is Cambridge Athletic Club. Fitness and athletic clubs have some specific challenges that our product is aimed towards solving. Not just getting new membership, but also keeping your membership involved in your club. It’s important for gyms to get new members on a regular basis, and we can help with that, but every member that doesn’t quit is another one that you dont’ have to worry about refilling. oFitnessclub can help with incorporating various forms of social networking into the site, as well as some other features to make the life of a gym manager more bearable.

We have a number of future products in the pipeline. oLawoffice is live, and we’ll be focusing on bringing that up soon. As well as oScientist, creating websites for science and technology research companies. We’re looking to do numerous other future products as well.

For now though OrcaPack and our new website have changed to our new product focus, so we can bring the experience we’ve learned working with these industries for the past 8 years directly to our new customers, for a low monthly cost, instead of a high initial investment.

For more information please contact Tim Hinkel by calling OrcaPack toll free at 866 830-8165 or contact us using our email contact form.

Sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses. Or take a picture of Greenwood Street looking up the hill to Stanton Heights. Either way you’re interacting with the world in some way, stopping to look at stuff. Not so worried about time, time, time, but willing to see life as a sequence of events, you go from one to the next, and if you don’t get there precisely at 5pm then well, that’s ok. You saw something cool along the way.

Of course other times you really want to get to where you’re going, and the sights aren’t that interesting, but they waylay you nonetheless.

I had hoped to make a tremendous amount of progress on our corporate site yesterday but I got waylaid by some emergency client work. One of our clients sites got shut down by their host, Hostgator. Apparently they were using up too many resources. Why that is I’m not sure. I think the developer who originally put their site together did a really crappy job, but I can’t say. I’ve never really looked too hard at it.

Of course then it gets shut down for taking too many resources away on a virtual server and it’s emergency central. I can’t blame em really. Their site was totally down. I talked with Hostgator’s support and they said to just respond to the email tech support ticket that they say they sent, but didn’t, and it’d get turned back on. I tell them to resend it, and they do. So we respond back saying “turn the site back on”. But they won’t. Not until we document exactly what we’ve done to insure it won’t happen again.

At this point the client is freaking out, and we convince them to go onto the Rackspace Cloud, spend a little more money, and then we can figure it all out. Hostgator wouldn’t even let us run the site to see what kinds of errors it was kicking or anything. It’s kind of hard to figure out what the problem is with a WordPress site if you can’t turn it on.

Sure we could have put it on a whole ‘nother test server, but what would be the point of that? Why not just turn it on in the same location but live. Same problme for Hostgator, but we get the site up. Even when I said, “ok we’re going to go witha a dedicated server, but in the meantime till we switch it over, can oyu make the site live?” but they wouldn’t. So they lost the business of the client.

If they had just worked with us, and not been so rude on the phone with the attitude that we were taking advantage of them they’d have probably turned a little money every month from someone using a virtual hosting account, into an over 130 buck a month dedicated hosting account… But instead they decide that customer service is best when it’s rude, and perfunctory, so there ya go.

We grabbed the site, stuck it on the cloud, and it’s running like a dream. It was crap on the Hostgator site. Ran like crap. Obviously it bogged their server down, because they shut the puppy down. Now though it’s flying, and someone else igs getting their money.

What’s my point of this story? I didn’t plan on doing any of that yesterday. Staying on hold with Hostgator for long stretches arguing with their techs. Digging around a file manager in CPanel, investigating a wordpress installation I had nothing to do with. Etc. These were ‘roses’ that were stuck in my face that I had no choice but to smell, rather than work on the OrcaPack corporate site.

So today I get to do it a bit more. This morning I had more client work, and then the boys came home and I had a 3 year old sitting on my shoulders while I tried to work, so back to the Moglo I go. And on the way I decided to stop for a few minutes and take a picture of a typical Pittsburgh street.

Why not right? Gotta stop and smell the roses.

I honestly don’t remember what I did yesterday. Is that bad?

I think I didn’t get much sleep the past couple of nights, a combination of staying up too late, being sick, the cat catching a mouse, and kids waking me up to goll darn early.

I mean really. Why can’t my five year old just get up on her own and go downstairs. She knows how to turn the TV on, she just hates to go down there alone while everyone is asleep. It’s killing me. 6:30am after I stay up till 3am and she is poking me in the eyes telling me to get up.

Not cool.

Anyway today I managed to get her to go wake up her mother who was sleeping on the bed in the baby’s room from whenever he woke up last, I think he got up four or five times last night. Another issue.

Then I managed to sleep till after 10am. Lazy? Maybe. Still if I had gotten up at 6:30 I wouldn’t still be awake now, and wouldn’t have been at all productive today. Better to get a good 3-4 hours in than nothing at all.

I decided for the afternoon today to head back down to the Morning Glory Coffeehouse here in Morningside. Fresh air, sunshine, coffee. Good stuff. Made some progress on the OrcaPack website. I think it’s going to take me longer than I thought, but I’m progressing. I have all the content written, but getting it into the pages, along with graphics and images is taking longer than I had expected to start with. I think though that once I get really going it’ll be faster. It’s mostly just getting the right stuff prepared at this point. I still hope I can get it live by the end of the week and we can start showing it off to people. Our current sites are just horrible compared to these, and I’m really enjoying working on our own stuff, rather than on stuff for other people.

Normally I blog in the morning, but since I woke up at 10 that was kind of shot, and i’m doing it now. I’ll do a few more things, and finish up my day and head home. I have to cook dinner tonight. Orange Cheek’AN. I’m not sure what the actual protein will be. Probably those veggie chicken strips.

It rained all night. I don’t think I mentioned before, but our gutters totally ripped from the house in the big Snowpocalypse in February. The icedams and snow ripped it from the house. It was a pretty scary sound. Last night the rain fell from the roof onto the gutter now leaned up against the house, awaiting repair or replacement once we find a contractor available. Tap tap tap tap tap. Not exactly soothing. Then waking up to a grey morning by your five year old at 6am after not going to bed until 3am.

The snow is almost gone though. Only one small sad patch remains in the front. Where the snow once proudly sloped all the way up to the tops of those bushes, it’s melted back into almost nothing.

Some places up the block are still fairly sizeable, but they’re hidden behind big bushes and things and don’t ever get sun. I wonder how long some of those will last.

Anyway, Yeah I’ll be crashing by mid afternoon. If you need something from me today I recommend getting it to me immediately because after lunch I’m gonna be a hot mess.

I wish I could find something that would effectively perk me up in the afternoons. I know it’s coming. Right now I’m ok, but I feel it. I know that by 12 my brain will start shutting down, and I might even fall asleep at my desk by 3pm if I’m still sitting here. I’ve tried all sorts of stuff to keep me awake and functional but nothing really pulls it.

Coffee sometimes keeps me awake. More likely I lay on the couch groggy unable to keep the children from jumping on me, unable to react while some weird PBS Kids show flys by on the television. Maybe I pass out and then it’s 5pm and i smell dinner cooking.

I tried Sudafed. yeah it’s speed. Yeah it doesn’t work for me. It certainly dries out my sinuses and it wires me up, and I certainly won’t fall asleep but my brain is turned off. i can’t really compute things. It’s like part of my brain falls asleep but my body won’t.

And that 5 hour shot thing that is all over the hulu’s now in advertising? I tried it. it’s an espresso shot mixed with a B-12 shot, mixed with sweet and low. Not only did it taste disgusting, but it didn’t do a damn thing for me.

I think maybe there’s really only one thing that keeps me from totally shutting down at 2pm.  A minimum of 6 hours uninterrupted sleep, a decent breakfast, and sunshine. Give me a grey damp day, 3 hours sleep, and coffee and I’m as good as comatose.

What’s the point of this? Meh i don’t know. I think my brain already shut down. At least I’ve had a productive week. We’ll see what I can get accomplished today, but I’m looking forward to kicking ass on the new OrcaPack site next week, and getting it live hopefully sometime next week. Then moving onto the product sites. oClubhouse first after OrcaPack, then oDaycare and oFitnessclub.

I have even more things on my list after that.

For now though… I think I might just veg.

So my current project is to revamp the content on our main OrcaPack site. Right now it’s basically describing a company that no longer exists. We’ve undergone so many transformations, it frequently feels like we’ve spent 8 years doing not much.

Of course we’ve been in business for 8 years doing some of the worst economic times since the Great Depression, and we’re still going. There’s something to be said for that.

We started as a product company though and over the years we morphed into a services company, and that’s what the current website shows. We did fine at it, but fine isn’t good enough, and in the end it wore us down. We got sick of working hard for other people. Having bright ideas to make other people successful, all while generally being treated like crap, or like web monkeys, and generally not listened to.

Oh sure there were great clients here and there, people who got it. People who respected what we were doing for them. More often than not though they didn’t really care, they didn’t really value what we were doing, and they nickel and dimed everything we did while asking us to work our asses off for them.

Well that’s on the way out…and on the way in. The new OrcaPack.

Tim my partner (timhinkel.com) has got the initial site together, but I’m going through and rewriting content. Really all our new content sucks. It’s way too technical, it doesn’t sell what we’re doing or what our products are, or why they’re important or needed. The hope though is that our sites and content will sell themselves. That people need the things we’ll be offering, and will see our sites and it’ll make them contact us, because we look to fill that need.

So first step is to get OrcaPack updated. We have a new logo, new designs, and new content….I just need to kick it into gear and get the rest of it written and not waste more time getting my wordpress blog to look pretty.

So, it’s no secret that I primarily work from home. Brick and mortar is fun and all, and maybe if we ever get enough people working on our products all in one place we’ll spring for some ultra cool hip office space with a foosball table and free soft drinks, but it ain’t gonna be today.

I do love my office though. I used to have it on the main floor at the back of the house. The room was basically open to the rest of the main area of the house, and it was also a travel path from the living and dining room through to the backyard, or the laundry area, or the first floor bathroom. Essentially my office doubled as a hallway for a third of the rest of the floor, and with a two year old and a four year old, as well as a stay at home wife…things got…a bit busy.

It wasn’t a problem before we had kids to work from home, nor even after we had one, and she was an infant or in child care, but when my wife got pregnant with her third, I knew it was time to refinish the basement and get my office down there or I’d never get a scrap of work done. Maybe another day I’ll post some pictures of the work my father in law and I did on fixing up the basement. Basically it was a post-apocalyptic 1970′s Pizza Hut with mouse nests and skeletons everywhere. I had to gut it completely, tear down the old spackled cheap plywood walls, rotting in some places, the horrific and falling to dust drop ceiling, the red flattened shag rug, the plastic fake textured brick superglued to the plywood which I spent a month’s spare time tearing off, before eventually just ripping the whole wall down….

Anyway it’s all finished now, new drywall, painted recessed ceilings and track lights, new electric for the computers (I have EIGHT OUTLETS for my work station… no more triple chained surge protectors). I moved down immediately when it was complete this spring, before the baby came, and my productivity increased tremendously. I really love it.

There’s one problem though. The cat.

See this is not my cat. This is a cat my wife was given as a gift back when she was in grad school. She didn’t even want a cat then, but her roommate gave it to her, and how can you turn down a cat. I’m highly allergic, and when we moved in together and got married we tried to get rid of the cat. Noone wanted her, so we kept her. Of course both her brother and her parents said at the time they didn’t want a cat, and both within a couple years had bought new cats of their own. Anyway, so now I live with this cat, spend ungodly amounts of money on asthma medication because of her, and so on. Well her catbox is also in the basement, down in the basement bathroom. It’s not literally next to my office, but that doesn’t matter.

New cat food and old cats do not mix. My wife bought her some new dietary cat food to help her because she’s old or something, and dear god almighty…Seriously, when the cat goes now the whole house stinks. You can smell it on the second floor of the house. It’s like a rotten meat stewy smell mixed with vomit. It’s so strong you can taste it. I have an air purifier, and a glad plugin in my office now, but it still doesn’t even come close to helping. It’s like the Maginot Line of odor protection, and the poop smell is already in Paris. I tried immediately jumping up and running back there to spray the entire area….nay… hose the entire area down with Lysol, and it helps, but now it smells like lysol, and faint cat poop still there lingering.

So, I’ve decided to make it an outdoor day. Weather is nice enough, cool fall breeze, sunny sky. Why not. I love my new office the 95% of the time when the cat isn’t ripping one loose back in her catbox, but really if 5% of the time I get to work outside things could be alot worse.

I can’t do coding as well on my laptop. I like to use a full keyboard and multiple screens and a real mouse when i do it, but it’s ok. Same thing with design. It’s a bit harder without my work station. So I’m gonna do some Information Architecture on the new OrcaPack site to bring it up to speed with where the company is now. OrcaPack has morphed so many times at this point, what’s one more iteration.

Originally we started as a product company, making a product similar to what we had been making at the previous company I was at, which went tits up thanks to 9/11 (nearly all the companies being targeted for initial sales were in the Towers). So we tried to mirror that, before we moved on to doing web maintenance and monkey work for various companies. We dabbled for a while as something more akin to retained web services, transitioned a bit to be a little higher end while still doing maintenance, etc. That’s where the website is at currently, not showing that we’ve gone BACK to a product focus.

So we need to rebrand and rearchitect Orcapack to show off the new products and our basic services, and get those off the ground. We already have customers for all the products, we just need more, and we really kinda need the websites to help out in that regard. I mean we are a web company after all.

As I have mentioned our first focuses for products are odaycare.com, oclubhouse.com and ofitnessclub.com, with olawoffice.com in there as well, but that’s on a back burner.

odcaycare.com is going to be a product focused on providing a high quality website to daycares and preschools. We’ve architected and designed these sites to go up fast, and be very high quality. If a new day care were to come to us for a custom site it’d be at least $10,000 for just something basic, and probably more. Why pay that though, if you don’t need to. We’ve created an architecture and features specifically targeted towards these businesses and provide them as  a product they can purchase on a monthly basis. And really, if it gets the daycare just ONE student it pays for itself, and then some. If you’ve ever tried to find a local daycare online you know it can be a real pain, and even if you do find a site, it’s probably not any good. Yet we have a new customer who had filled up BEFORE she even opened her doors thanks to her website. People found it, liked what they saw, and signed up. Her new daycare was profitable ON DAY ONE. That’s a testimony right there.

I’ll talk about oclubhouse.com and ofitnessclub.com on some other day. Right now though I need to get my power cord, and headphones, and settle in for some work on orcapack.com while enjoying a clean cool breeze and a beautiful day.

Thanks cat. This should turn out nice.

Well it’s end of the week again. I’m glad I no longer work weekends. For awhile there I was working 7 days a week and it was just way too brutal on me.

Today was an OrcaPack day. I did alot of background noise stuff. Playing with the ins and outs of some WordPress stuff. Getting this blog set up. Getting my twitter feed set up http://twitter.com/sayfsharif if you’re interested…

Of course the fun part of the day was at 4 realizing that I couldn’t dial anyone on my iPhone. Tried calling my wife, nada. Tryed calling my business partner Tim, nada. Finally had to reboot the phone and then it worked fine.

I blame AT&T. The phone is great but AT&T is just godawful. Used to be fine for me then six months ago (or so) we had a storm in the spring time and a super cell came through. Ever since that storm came through my reception has been crap. Before that storm I had full bars every day everywhere in the house. AFter the storm fora  few days service was spotty, on and off, and no 3G at all. It got ‘better’ but these days that means that it’ll be at full bars and then it’ll be at no service completely and I’ll drop a call.

Or I’ll have full bars and the call will drop, and i’ll still have full bars, and I can’t get any kind of connection to call the person back for five minutes. Then I’ll have 3 bars.

Or I’ll sit at 1 measly bar all day long and the connection will be tenuous at best, anywhere in the house from the 2nd floor to the basement.

I don’t care what they say, I bet lightning struck the nearest cell tower to me in spring and since then it’s been crap. They’d never admit that though. Ah well.

OH and also my phone just won’t ring, and things will go to voice mail. I’ll make a call and then I’ll get the voicemail sound, and 3-4 voicemails from the past 5 hours that the phone has been 1 foot from me the whole time will ding in. Never rang once.

I tell people at AT&T this and they say the usual “are you a moron” questions like “did you have it on vibrate?” “Was the phone on?” “Were you in a tunnel?”

Useless.

Anyway. Now that I have this stuff up i can talk every day about my own stuff like this but also stuff like OrcaPack or our new product to provide great websites for daycare centers and preschools odaycare. Or our other products olawoffice, oclubhouse, and ofitnessclub as well as our custom design and development work, and future products, and any current clients that deserve a shoutout like CustomMade which we just launched and are helping move towards their next product version.

For now though i’m gonna go get my shorts on and take a walk to help prepare myself for Grouse Camp later this month, and then shower and relax in house with the family once they get home. We were gonna go to a high school football game tonight, but nobody wants to go out in the cold or rain, so instead we’ll put the kids to bed and I”ll probably end up playing World of Warcraft when wife and baby conk out at 9pm.

Toodles