Charfish is alive and well…with a new design to prove it!

Charfish is alive and well…with a new design to prove it!

written by Charlie Pabst

Welcome to the new Charfish Design…uh…design!

A bit about the new design, what prompted it and what’s coming up:

First off, the new design was built to be fast. Google is up to new things as usual, one of which is determining search rankings based on site speed. The old site was a bit more graphic-intense and wasn’t quite as fast as it should be.

Of course, hosting makes a difference in that as well, and we’re currently looking into new hosting solutions as well. But for now, the site, code and images herein should be fast enough for even the stingiest of search algorithms.

More fun than a kiddie pool full of colored balls, minus the urine.

More important than site speed, at least to us, was just having some plain old fun. I wanted to get away from any sort of dark, murky aspect this site had in previous incarnations. I don’t wear jackboots or beat people up (without provocation) so “let’s lighten up a little,” I said to myself.

I like things fun, light, fluffier than a chicken, and I wanted this site to reflect my own personality a bit more closely. After all, clients and I become friends. It’s nothing unusual to be calling each other by odd and wonderful nicknames shortly after meeting, and our phone calls go every which way, some of which aren’t fit for print. Awesomeness.

You may have seen our blog. It’s decomposing on the side of the road.

It has, in actual fact, been more than a year since we published a single new word to the blog. Sacrilege!

This is not for lack of ideas. It was, simply put, an experiment. Now that experiment is over and the blog will be resurrected with all sorts of fine things being churned forth.

A quick word about The Experiment. Shortly before said experiment started, Charfish had picked up steam and was sort of living a life of its own. Comments, emails, work, clients and friends were coming forth due to no trackable action on our part. So I thought, “Hmm…why not stop altogether? Let’s see what this inertia can spew forth.”

So for the last year, the only thing I’ve done (where this site is concerned) is my job: design, consultations, writing on other projects, etc. No freebies, no updated pages, not a single blog post, no advertising and no marketing.

Suicide, right? To most people’s thinking, probably, but in fact the reverse has happened. The inertia we’d noticed continued and Charfish has had more work over the past year than all previous years combined. Not only that, and much more importantly, we’ve expanded into new areas that we never even announced to anyone. They just happened as a natural organic sort of flow.

This is a wondrous magical thing and we can only thank our growing family of friends and clients for making this happen. You guys seem to have more ideas for us than we have for ourselves. You are the best crew around, times about 20 billion plus 5.

Extra, Extra!

Down in the happy new footer, you’ll see a newsletter sign-up area. This newsletter idea is new territory to explore and we’re pretty excited about it.

To give a couple hints about what’s coming up with that, we’ve got a store in the works. There will soon be a new WordPress framework (with accompanying themes), icons and other general yumminess. There will be specials and discounts for members, so if you’re interested (you are), get thee on the list 🙂

”Methinks your site needs some crutches.”

We believe in launching, doing and getting it out there. Well, we gave this new design a Godin-inspired “Ship it!” and he we are.

Therefore it’s very likely, in fact I guarantee, that some parts of the site might not yet be top-notch. We tested a lot and ran the site and coding through the wringer, but no doubt some things are still awry. After all, there’s probably some dude out in Podunk, browsing this new site on a Casio calculator with Internet Explorer 6 (I just threw up a little).

Speaking of Internet Explorer, you should probably be looking at this any website using Firefox or Safari to get the best experience. Ditch Internet Explorer altogether and your life will improve by a factor of at least eleven. Why? I could give you the philosophical stance or the technical one, but both pretty much equate to: Internet Explorer is pretty lousy for exploration. Sort of like trying to dig a ditch with soggy kleenex.

Anyway…regardless of your browser…if you find anything funky, feel free to give us a shout and we’ll fix it. Unless it’s Internet Explorer. Then we’ll probably just shrug and say, “Meh.”

That’s about it for now, gang.

I appreciate you being out there, folks. It’s been a great year, and this has been more fun than I would have dared imagine.