Moving On

Five years ago on Thanksgiving weekend Heather and I moved our family from a two bedroom apartment in San Antonio to a three bedroom apartment in Cedar Park (Austin) to start a new job with a dental marketing company called Practice Cafe. Due to a series of unfortunate events I had been laid off from my job in October (2006) and on a whim (errr desperation) decided to extend my job search to the Austin area via Craigslist. Practice Cafe’s job listing actually really intimidated me at the time. I really felt like I had no real chance at getting the job. My thought process was, “what would it hurt to at least try.” So I sent over my resume along with a link to a REALLY bad portfolio website. I had never actually done any real “billable” design work up to that point. My entire website consisted of school projects. I think my confidence was also pretty low since a month or two earlier I had tried to get a job with a local digital creative agency in San Antonio where they told me that they couldn’t hire me because I wasn’t “billable.”

I was pretty shocked when after 1-2 days I was contacted by Practice Cafe and invited to drive to Austin for an interview. I wanted to be memorable so I came up with a quick idea to create a small logo book (that I think Joel still has on his book shelf in his office) and got it printed at Kinkos. The funny thing was that it cost like $12.00 to make the book. This was a lot of money (to us) at the time, and Heather gave me a lot of grief for spending the money to have it printed. She thought it was a silly idea and a waste of money. Regardless, I took my lil’ book of logos, my portfolio of student work, drove up to Cedar Park in north Austin, and had my interview. My mom was actually working near by in Round Rock so I went and visited her after my interview and we both drove back to San Antonio together. I had a really good feeling when I left the interview, and I really felt it went well (read my thoughts on the actual date).

A very grueling three weeks later they finally called just when Heather and I were both losing all hope and on the brink of complete despair. I had been out of work that entire time and we had Hannah who was roughly 18 months old at the time. I was so desperate for a job I went to a USAA job fair to try and get a job as a customer service rep. I stood in a really long line for a few hours in the parking garage. As I finally arrived at the door they told me that the interviews were over with and we’d all need to come back tomorrow. At the end of the next day was when I finally received the phone call from Practice Cafe offering me the position.

I am so grateful that Brian, Angie, and Joel were willing to take a chance on me. I seriously had no real experience or much of anything to really prove to them that I would actually help their business. I have no real clue why they hired me.

When I started working there I was the 7th employee and the company was only a year old as an actual “LLC.” I was so thrilled and excited to be working for Practice Cafe. After only a few months the company hit a really rough transition period and it was looking like there was a pretty good chance the company wouldn’t make it. We all pulled together and pushed our way through it. That experience in the first year helped me feel less like an employee and more like I was actually a part of the company or rather that the company was a family and I was a part of that family.

Now Practice Cafe has 13 employees. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it all. Practice Cafe cultivates a creative work environment which encourages growth. They financially encouraged me to continue learning through the purchase of many books as well as 3 consecutive years of SXSW Interactive badges. I was also in an environment which provided me the freedom to learn, grow, and progress as a designer and a person. I was able to freely share my opinions, beliefs, philosophies, random ramblings. Collectively over the past five years I feel we all worked together to make each other better which resulted in the business as a whole becoming more successful and better. Practice Cafe is now one of the leaders in the dental marketing community. I’m proud to of been a part of it all.

What’s Next

For four years I worked in a sales position as a telemarketer. I spent time doing both in bound and outbound work. I hated my job and constantly dreaded going to work. While I was at work I spent most of my time trying not to stare at the clock. I decided then that as soon as I was through with school I would never have a job where I dreaded/hated going to work. I can honestly say that I have never dreaded going to work for the past 5 years with Practice Cafe. I loved my job and I loved the people I worked with and for. So back in August when I got a random phone call during the day from an 801 phone number. I actually only answered the call because I thought that it might be one of my long lost companions from my mission. Instead it was John Dilworth, he told me he was with Family Search and that they wanted to fly me out to Utah so they could get to know me better and I could also meet all of them. Initially I told him I wasn’t really looking for another job. He assured me that there was no obligation, just that they’d really love for me to come out so I could learn more about the opportunity and they could see if I was a good fit for them.

Well, I took him up on his offer. I flew up and I went through all the intense interviews. I returned home and within a week they had extended an offer to me. Heather and I both spent a good deal of time really pondering over and praying about this opportunity. This was a huge decision for us. We are both from Texas. We both have a great deal of Texas pride. My children are still young and quite frankly I didn’t like the thought of my two youngest children being so young that they would never actually remember anything about Texas. This could potentially make them not Texan. Beyond this we had just recently purchased our first house less than two years ago. The majority of our family lives in Texas. Another personal goal of mine is that I really want my children to grow up actually knowing their cousins, uncles, aunts, and grand parents. That was something I never had growing up and I’ve always wanted. Thus far we’ve actually been able to do a reasonably good job at this. Then there was also the fact that I really loved where I worked and the work I was doing. In fact I still feel as though I am abandoning Practice Cafe and letting each and everyone of the employees down to some degree by leaving.

The interesting aspect of all of this is when I finally stopped being selfish, and I stopped thinking about what I wanted was when it was completely clear what I needed to do. You see if you read the paragraph above all of my hesitations are fairly selfish and are all about what I “want.” So when I stopped focussing on all of that and really listened to my Heavenly Father, I could feel that this was something I needed to do. I still have no real clue why I’m supposed to do this. All I am doing is just trying to put my complete trust in God. They extended the final offer to me on September 9, 2011. The past two months have been a long and bumpy road. We have continued to push ourselves forward and now the day is finally upon us.

Well… Goodbye

Today was my last day of working at Practice Cafe. Friday the movers are coming to pack up all of our things. Monday they are loading everything into a truck. We are piling our three kids into our Mazda 5 and heading out on our 20 hour voyage to the rocky mountains of Utah.

“God gives us hope but we still fear what we don’t know.”

Although I am very sad to leave, I’m also excited for what the future holds. I’m excited to start working for Family Search. I’m excited for the opportunity to be a part of it all. I’m excited to work with all of the smart and amazingly talented folks at Family Search. Not to mention I’m giddy as a school girl to work on a Macbook Air.

Proud

When I first got hired on as a designer with the wonderful team over at Practice Cafe I’m not even sure their website showed up in a “Google Search” for anything BUT a search for “Practice Cafe.” Well a little short into a year of working their I was privledged to be able to take on the hefty job of redesigning their website. Well two more redesigns later and it is the beautiful site that I LOVE to inform people that I was a part of producing is now on the infinite abyss we all call the interweb (or is that just me?).

Well it quickly became a business goal to get ourselves ranked as high as possible in Google for a number of relevant searches. The main one being “Dental Marketing.” So we set out a little over a year ago to improve our ranking in “Dental Marketing.” So I dove in head first at researching “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO), and best practices in improving your ranking in Google. I quickly realized this was a very tricky little task. There is no solid formula or solid answer. Infact the more time went on it was almost as if, right when I got to the point where I was saying, “Hey I think I got a handle on this SEO business” I would quickly get a reality check of how much I DIDN’T know.

However with the help of a WONDERFUL team of copywriters in Angie Liddiard & Amanda Fuller, and some helpful hints and tricks from my good friend Noel Datko, we have successfully been able to implement a lot of tender love and care over the months and successfully reached page one in google in a handful of relevant and very competitive searches. In fact our visitors to our site per day has doubled if not tripled since I started working back in November of 2006.

So as you can see from the beautiful screen capture above we are currently residing in the NUMBER 5 out of 9,120,000 in a Google Search for the term “Dental Marketing.”

Click the picture above for an enlarged image, or you can just go ahead and do a quick Google Search yourself right now for “Dental Marketing” and take a VERY short scroll on down to “Practice Cafe” and go ahead and click your way over to Practice Cafe to see how we are VERY capable at handling any and all of your Dental Marketing needs (ZING!)

Although I still feel like an amateur when it comes to SEO, I am also very happy and proud that all of our work over the year has REALLY paid off. So I am anxious to continue to learn, grow, and develop these skills and to continue to improve both Practice Cafe’s website and the websites of all our clients. Each and every year the internet is becoming more and more important when it comes to a marketing budget, and how people want to market their company or business, and search engine optimization will continue to play a HUGE roll in the future of marketing in the world. So we are happy to be a part of this.

Keywords and Terms Practice Cafe ranks well in:

A Winter Wonderland!

The lights have been hung with care
All the festive hats are snug on our heads
With a friendly little snowman to bring in good cheer!
It’s a winter wonderland at PracticeCafé.com (snow included).

Practice Cafe 2008

If you recall in April 2007 I wrote a post mentioning how I had helped redesign the Practice Cafe website. Soon after that site was launched we quickly began to realize that the site had many limitations and flaws. The way the site was designed, was not conducive to a lot of growth and there wasn’t much flexibility. At the time I was still learning how to design webpages and I did the best I could with the knowledge I had. One of the main flaws of the old site was that it was not very accessible as a website should be. not only that but we realized their was a lot of things we as a company wanted our website to do and say that it wasn’t doing, and it was too hard to get it to do those things without redesigning it all together.

So back in July 2007 we decided to start refreshing our site. The last time we tried to do it way too quickly and therefore the site had far too many mistakes. so this time we decided we were going to take it slower and really think it through. After discussing the specific goals we needed the site to achieve I came up with a rough design for the site, shown above (click on the image to view a larger version).

However after further discussion we realized that I wasn’t looking at this opportunity as giving myself a blank canvas. This design was only a slight modification of the old site, and I think I was trying to hold on to too many elements of the old flawed site. Another flaw to this design was that we wanted to have the entire waitress still standing to the side on every page of the website, since she has become one of the ways many people recognize our company. So I decided to start fresh, and I came up with a second idea for the website, shown above (click on the image to view a larger version).

Still this new idea didn’t seem to really accomplish everything we had in mind. So we began to start to make several tweeks. One major problem was that we wanted the waitress to be one of the first things you saw on every page without having to scroll. We also needed her to be standing on the red checkered floor. So we finally came to a solid design which met all of our goals, at least on a graphics level.

So then we had a team meeting during lunch where we came up with a strong sitemap for the site. In the meeting we discussed in detail the goals we had for our site as far as content was concerned. We came to the conclusion that we wanted our website to be more educational, and informative. We wanted the site to be extremely user friendly, and accessible. Another goal was for our site to be better optimized for search engines.

At the end of that meeting we set a goal to launch the new site in April 2008. So 47 pages later I am happy to now say that the new site has been launched and is happily in it’s natural habitat on the world wide interweb here. Please feel free to follow the link and visit the site, and please tell me what you think of the site?

I have to say that this website was very much a collaborative effort, so although most of the design and coding was done by myself, it was only after a lot of brainstorming and other discussions with Joel. Also Angie took on the job of writing and preparing almost all of the copy for the website, and I have to say she did a very beautiful job. She really turned the site into a very educational and informative site. Shara also helped write and prepare the case studies, and all of the partner pages of the website and did an equally fabulous job. Then as a team we all took turns reading, re-reading, and searching the site to catch as many mistakes as we could find and fixing them all the way up until the last moment when I was given the “OK” to set the refreshed site FREE on Thursday April 17, 2008.

Career Designs by Andrea

Friday I finished up the last few tweaks and took another website live. both of you reading are prolly thinking, “who cares,” Which is a very valid thought, who does care. Well besides me, I guess the client cares. Other than that the only real reason I am posting about it, besides the fact I think I did a mighty fine job is because this is the first site I finished designing that isn’t for a dentist.

Enjoy.

Premier Family Dental

My most recently designed website went live this past week. I’m really proud of what I have been able to accomplish in the ways of web design. I’ve been designing websites off and on for the past 5 years now. I wish i was able to somehow get all the websites I’ve done online as an archive so I could truly show you my progression from the beginning up until now. Actually I think I just may be able to do it. It will take some digging, and I think it may be worth it.

It even features such beautiful things such as this coupon which was drawn by me and tweaked by my creative director and friend Joel.

Anyways go ahead and click on the images to see the site Live & direct and In Full Effect!!!!

In the near future we should be able to add some actual pictures of the Dentist, as well as her office. Personally I feel this is the best site I have designed that is currently live and in it’s natural habbitat.

Enjoy.

Landmark

I recently finished up a project for a dentist in Littleton, Massachusetts. I first did a Direct Mail campaign for him, which was followed up with a website. This in itself isn’t that unusual at my job. In fact I have designed 10 direct mailers and 4 websites since I have been working with Practice Cafe. With two more Direct Mailers in the process of being printed, and another 3 Direct Mailers still in the design stages. I also have 4 other websites I am currently designing.

There are a few things that make this project different and special:

1.) This is the first website I hand coded in valid XHTML, & CSS. It is the first time I designed a tableless site solo.

2.) It was the first time I did the design of the site on the fly as I was coding it.

What do I mean by that? Well usually I would design a site in Photoshop or Illustrator. Then after I came up with how the site will look, I take my design and use it as a blueprint as I create the actual website.

So this time I just started designing and creating the site on the fly all in the code. I tried to rely as much on the power of CSS, and as little as possible on slices and images.

My only help in creating the website was this wonderful book called, CSS Mastery.

3.) I touched on it a bit in number one, however I believe this deserves it’s own number. This is the first site I created that is valid. I’m sure there are quite a few readers out there that have NO clue what I am talking about. Well if you click on the link “valid” you will see that it takes you to a website that has a green bar that reads, “This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!” So this basically this is the first time I created a site on my own that I got a GREEN bar. Which means my code is correct, and should be understood by most if not all browsers.

Anyways I hope that Stephen Gianino is as happy with the results as I am. Also anyone living in and around the Littleton, MA area feel free to visit Stephen Gianino, check the website for a list of services, and any other info about his practice.

Preston Ridge

Accosionally we get clients that come and go as far as communication is invovled, so some projects seem to just linger. This project was rather intresting for me in paticular because of how much personal growth was invovled as the project was happening. the first project I ever did for this doctor was an advertisement he was putting in the yellow pages. From their I started designing a direct mailer that would be mailed out to around 10,000 people in his general area. After that I did a general design for a website.

The doctor approved the yellow page ad within a few days of me finalizing the design, after that we didn’t hear from him for a month about any of the other projects. The next time we heard from him was because he was ready to print some business cards with the logo that Phil designed. Then he disapeared again. During that time I progressed a significant amount in HTML, XHTML, & CSS, as I jumped on the intellegent bandwagon of “Web Standards” which was started by Jeffrey Zeldman.

So I decided to totally redesign his website from the original design trying to impliment some of the new skills I had aquired. Today the website has finally gone live for the whole entire intrawebs pleasure.

Enjoy.

Practice Cafe

So I can officially say I finished my first week now. I was supposed to start on Monday, and showed up to move into my apartment on Saturday with a Uhaul, and the Inlaws ready to get everything situated, and I was made aware that the apartment was never approved for us to move in. (although we had been told a week earlier that it was ready, and they were expecting us.) It was a giant fiasco that ended in us staying the weekend with my new fantastic, and totally awesome boss, Rebecca Palmer. Hannah got sick, and Monday at around 12:00pm we were finally given the ok to sign the contract and move into our apartment. By then it was only me, and Jared (my boss’s husband) so we moved everything into the apartment, and slowly we, by we I mean Heather, have begun putting everything in the right places, and getting it into a livable/homey condition. We have our Christmas tree up, and decorations are placed sporadically around the rooms, and it has been rather nice.

I finally started work last Tuesday, and I pretty much just hit the ground running, with a few trips on the way. They were already pretty busy, so they kinda just threw me on some projects, and I just worked my way through them asking TONS of questions along the way. I have a huge desk, my own phone (with my own extension & voice mail,) a G5 MAC with a dope flat screen monitor. 

Their are 3 designers that work their, two of us (including me) are brand spanking new, and whenever a new logo is being designed everyone gets to take a stab at it, then as an office we pick the best 6-8 of everyones, and send them to the client, then whoever’s get’s picked they pretty much take over the rest of the file. So today we heard back from the first Logo I took part in designing, and one of mine was chosen. I have to say I was quite shocked, and at the same time I was giddy as a school girl.

My desk has slowly become consumed with projects, and I find myself having to force myself to go home, one day I just totally skipped lunch working straight through…

It’s madness, but it is so much fun, I’m LOVING it!