March 2007 Archives

Lately I’ve had the pleasure of working with a spinoff of Best Buy called CultureRx, the innovators of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). The idea is simple: work is about getting things done, not about spending time in an office or in meetings. Employees at the Minneapolis-based Best Buy headquarters are free to come and go as they please. Different from the classic flextime structure where employees coordinate their own schedules with their managers, ROWE workers can work whenever and wherever they want without answering to anybody — as long as their work gets done. Say goodbye to 8:00 am meetings and one-hour lunches. Sleep when you’re tired, eat when you’re hungry, work when you can get things done.

Small businesses like Bust Out Solutions operate 100% on the ROWE principal just by the nature of the company. Our success model is simple: when work gets done the business succeeds. Naturally this requires a certain level of initiative and self-discipline, and it doesn’t always mean you have the freedom to what you want when you want. Customers still come first and deadlines are still real. So far, it’s working. I figure if the Results-Only Work Environment is good enough for Bust Out Solutions, it’s gotta be good enough for Best Buy.

A lot of people ask me what tools I use to build websites, so I thought I’d share with you my basic arsenal of development applications and services that I find to be most useful. When starting a website from scratch, you need to find a domain name, register it, build a website, and then host that website somewhere. Here is a description of what I personally use to get the job done.

Because of its simplicity and ajaxification, I use instantdomainsearch.com when looking for a domain name. I use GoDaddy to register domains and manage DNS for no good reason other than I’m lazy to switch. So far, so good, and the prices are reasonable ($8.95/year per domain). As for hosting, I’ve used several good companies, yet not one is perfect. Dreamhost is the biggest bang for the buck ($7.95/month for shared hosting) while MMMultiworks offers great customer service for mission-critical Rails applications (~$300/month for a dedicated server). Network Solutions has horrible customer service but is technically reliable, Planet Argon is not bad for cheap Rails hosting, and Total Choice Hosting is a waste of your time.

To develop simple sites, I use the code editor in Adobe Dreamweaver. I rarely ever use the WYSIWYG editor, only because I like to have full control over the structure of the markup and CSS. For image processing I predominantly use Adobe Fireworks, but when working with graphic designers I tread water with Photoshop and Illustrator. Iconfactory’s xScope is absolutely indispensable when measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts. For all my FTP needs, I use Transmit. By the fact that I use xScope and Transmit, you can guess that my machine of choice is a MacBook Pro. I use Parallels Desktop for Mac extensively for platform testing in Windows, because as a web developer you can never underestimate the stupidity of Internet Explorer.

Welcome to the new Bust Out Solutions, Inc. website! The structure of this site is based on the elastic layout, which means almost everything is defined relative to the size of the text. Nothing is defined in pixels, the traditional method for determining widths and heights on a computer screen. A pixel is a fixed size, whereas the “em” is a unit of size based on the size of the font. This method increases the accessibility of the site since many users with poor vision choose to set a larger default font size in the browser. Give it a whirl, click around the site, and let me know what you think!

Special thanks to Andrew Bessler of Play for his graphic design help on the site.