I do not, for the record, believe in celebrity. Maybe because I grew up in NYC surrounded by famous people, it’s a pretty meaningless concept to me. I can tell you that Tom Cruise rents movies like everyone else, that Isabella Rosellini eats at restaurants like everyone else, and that Cher goes to the grocery store like everyone else, too.

As a result, I am probably hard to impress. The people I admire, I admire because of what they have to say or what they’ve done, not because of who they are. I mean, even the most amazing people are just people – mostly people who wish you’d buy them a beer.

After all, everyone poops.

But if the internet excels at anything, it’s making celebrity out of molehills. It is very, very easy to get sucked into your own PR, and to start believing everything you read about yourself. I’ve watched, and continue to watch, many people trip over their own internet egos in spectacular fashion and it is, frankly, embarrassing.

A little over a year ago, when I noticed my online profile escalating rather sharply, I made some fairly rash decisions about how to manage my internet ego. This is what I decided to do:

• Stop Reading Web Stats: While it’s nice that when I write a blog post, a big bunch of people turn up to read it, that’s just weird for me. I started blogging when there were like 300 blogs online, total. I blogged before there was blogging software; I hacked a guest book script to do it. I still write for an audience of 50, and that’s how many lovely people I like to pretend are reading.
• Turn Off Twitter Notifications: Lots of interesting people turn up in my @replies or are re-tweeted by the small, trusted circle I already follow, and I find them organically. I don’t need the ego pat of knowing when someone new finds my Twitter account.
• Turn Off Google Alerts: Likewise, I don’t need to know every time someone mentions my name. Often what’s said is wrong, offensive, or just so weird it’s more harmful than helpful. When I want fucking moronic, I read 4chan.
• Say No to Blog Interviews: Like newspapers and magazines, one has no control over what comes out on the other side, but I’m sad to say that in my experience bloggers are more problematic. Often the result enrages me. Very rarely does it make me happy.

I feel compelled to point out that the Smashing thing angered me not because of anything Lee Munroe did, but because of editorial choices on the part of Smashing. Not a single site of mine (and Lee sent in several) made it to the showcase part of an article called Showcase of Web Design in Ireland. Either I’m good enough to make the cut, including the showcase, or I’m not. Keeping my words but cutting my work smacks of tokenism, and I’m done with that.

Granted, I am sensitive to this issue because the context in which I am most likely to be mentioned is as a “Top Female Web Designer.” The web is awash with female web designers; I do not understand the compulsion to gather us together and stick us in a special little ghetto. I don’t want to be praised for my gender; I want to be respected for my work on its own merits.

Having said that, I’m perfectly cognisant of my abilities. I punch solidly in my weight class, but I am not a top-tier web designer. I create very nice, very usable sites for great people at nifty companies at an accessible price, and that is good enough for me.

No matter what Google Alerts may try to tell me.

WordCamp Ireland 2010 wrapped up this afternoon, and at exactly 4PM as the last punter walked out of the amazing Set Theatre, I melted into an incredibly pleasant state of complete and total relaxation. Doing this again may be worth it just for that sleep deprived, adreniline fuled, frantic-rush induced state of Nirvana.

WordCamp was, in a word, fun. I’ve posted a quick thank you post over on the blog, but I also have some more random thoughts as I sit here enjoying my swanky hotel room for one last night before going back to the real world.

We could not have pulled this off without the amazing staff at Langton’s. Everyone raved about the hotel. Nothing was too much trouble. You don’t know how many people are coming to dinner? Not a problem. You need two sets for the stage? Not a problem. You need snacks we don’t stock for the kids, and you need them right fucking now? Also not a problem because we will get in a car and DRIVE TO THE SUPERMARKET FOR YOU.

Failure of snack planning aside, much ado was made about the fact that this was a family-friendly conference with child care. I’m not sure anyone who attended had ever been to a conference with child care before. I’m not sure Katherine and I had ever been to one either, but it never occurred to us to do anything else. And, honestly, it was easy. I’ll write more about it later but basically: two babysitters, €60 worth of kid tat from World of Crap, an activity schedule and you’re away.

Everyone should do this – the kids were not disruptive, they were not noisy, and every single child (including our favourite escape artist) was cooperative and very well behaved.

Kids aside, there were two distinct camps of attendees at WordCamp. People who came from a BarCamp sort of background had, in general, a great time. The venue was big and plush, speakers were both impressive and totally accessible, and if not every camper could fit into every session they wanted to attend, well there were a zillion other sessions and coffee in the ballroom.

The tiny percentage of people who came from the Vegas – Le Web – NextGen circuit were less happy. There were not always enough seats, these folks didn’t seem to circulate well in the frequent coffee and meal sessions, and they generally seemed undewhelmed. On the other hand, I expect people from that sort of background to be able to do the math on their  ticket price and adjust accordingly. SXSW is $395. MIX is $1400. Le Web is €1,200. WordCamp is €50.

Is WordCamp Le Web? No. But it’s not €1,200 either.

The speakers who were scheduled for the Conservatory were champions. We had two days of glorious sunny weather – in March, in Ireland – and it killed this glass-topped room for projectors and as a workable venue. Loads of speakers switched to a white-board presentation style effortlessly and far more smoothly than I would have been able to, and I admire every single one of them (and apologise and promise to sort that for the next WordCamp Ireland.)

I gave a talk – luckily not in the Conservatory – on using WordPress as the base for your social networking world domination plan, and it was solidly mediocre. In all honesty, given the fact that I had had five hours of sleep in the preceding 72, I was tremendously pleased with myself for doing even that well. It was not my best performance, but doing it was by far the biggest effort I have ever made to get on stage and stay cognisant for 45 minutes, and it felt nothing short of triumphant to pull it off at all.

Katherine did rather better, having had a grand total of 11 hours of sleep since Thursday, and I was delighted for her that her presentation was so well received. Neither one of us, however, is ever speaking at a camp we are also organising ever again. It is simply too much to take on.

And because it will take us more than a year to recover, we’ve also decided that the WordCamp Irelands we organise will be every-other-year events. It’s not feasible, given the time commitment, for us to do this every year, but we have already opened the calendars and flicked forward a few pages to look at when we might do WordCamp 2012.

Edit: Fuck it, we’re up for 2011. It’s on!

And yes, there will be more sandwiches.

Photo Credit: Donncha O Caoimh

March is shaping up to be a mad, mad month. Also a broke month, as I’ll be travelling a lot. Since I do not travel well, I’ll probably only complete one billable project between all these events. But I’m very excited about each of these trips and thus, they are worth the pain, jet lag and poverty.

At least, that’s what I’ll be telling my bank manager when I ask him for an overdraft extension…

March 6 -7th I’ll be at WordCamp Ireland, although I’m actually travelling up to Kilkenny on the 2nd to prepare all week – 200 bags do not stuff themselves. There are still something like 30 tickets, so get ‘em while they’re hot.

March 14 – 18th I’ll be in Las Vegas for MIX10, staying next door at The Luxor. I’ll know virtually nobody but the schedule looks great and there are some talks I’m really keen to go to, although nothing is going to keep me out of CSI: The Experience.

March 27th I’ll be getting drunk sipping tea in an extremely posh suite at the g for the Ladies Tea Party before the Irish Blog Awards. I just love Tea Party; it is so friendly and fun and great to meet so many bloggers in a smaller setting. Come along!

March 27th, assuming I have not passed out by 7 PM, I’ll also be at the Irish Blog Awards. It is genuinely a great night out, and hopefully I’ll be cheering for a few clients who make it from the long list to the short list. Go team go!

SavieCard was a fun project because everything was built from scratch, and I got to name it, brand it, logo it, design the site for it, and do a silly amount of print for it, which normally I hate. I do like the fact that each person has a logo colour for their card back:

The entire site was built using WordPress. With hindsight, given how much the site grew from spec to launch, I would not make that choice for this project again, and v2 will be built on a different framework. At the moment it’s held together with gaffer tape and bailing wire, but it is holding…

Recently, I got “busted” in the comments on a blog post for using a template to create a website. The website in question is WordCamp Ireland; the template in question is the suitably named Fun Design Theme.

Except there really isn’t a question. First of all, that theme was specifically credited on the WordCamp site – a credit cleverly hidden in a page on the menu called, you know, Thanks and Credits.

Second of all, I am pretty transparent about the fact that I freaking love templates. While I bill myself as a web designer, the fact of the matter is that clients really hire me to solve a problem. Generally that problem is that they don’t have a website, but sometimes it’s that they don’t have a website and don’t have any budget either.

Solving both of those problems at the the same time is my job. While a client with unlimited imagination, a healthy budget and at least a few weeks in their schedule is the ideal, it is not always the reality for the people I prefer to work with. MarketingWriteNow had 24 hours; they got Concise. Fuchsia Cottage was done as a swap; they got EarthlyTouch. Radisens wanted something blue and efficient; they got BlueLight.

While it is theoretically possible I am the slowest web designer in the universe, I don’t think I am; a new design for a homepage takes about 8 hours, and XHTML and CSS takes about 5, even for fairly simple sites. Then there are all those hours of content bludgeoning, cross-browser tweaking, and custom functionality. It adds up.

But, using a template, I can often get small sites out the door in a single day, at significantly less expense to the nice person paying the bill.

Some designers consider this cheating. I do not, for a few reasons. First of all, I see it as being very similar to buying stock photography or stock vectors, both of which are very standard practice. More importantly, I think there is a skill set in picking templates and stock, and that that skill set has value. Most clients browsing through templates are stuck on the visuals, but choosing the right template for a project is all about the layout. If the structure of the container is right for the content, you can pretty much make it look like anything.

That’s because a good portion of the billed time is usually spent customising the theme’s graphics; The Good Wine Show does not, I like to think, look the same as Prominence, even though the layouts are duplicates. And quite often, even the most perfect templates require at least a few hours of customisation – template makers are obsessed with Java script hover menus, for example, but no hover menu will ever appear on any site I put my name on.

At the same time, I know a lot of designers will never, ever use a template on principle. I completely understand and respect that commitment. But frankly, I also know a lot of designers who bill out considerably more than I do each year. I made a decision a long time ago about the kind of clients I wanted to work with as a freelancer, and that client is most often a small business start-up. While the financial profile of these companies varies, the people behind them are also often broke.

And at my house, even broke people deserve nice websites.

The event I look forward to most every year is the Irish Blog Awards, although honestly it’s mostly because of the Ladies Tea Party held before hand. And this year, when it was announced that the awards were being held in Galway, I set my heart on one of the swankiest venues in Ireland.

Thanks to help from Maria Moynihan and sponsorship from L’Onglex, I’m delighted to announce that the L’Onglex Ladies Tea Party will be held in a posh, posh suite at the posh, posh g hotel. The date is 27 March from 4 – 7 PM, and this year’s event will include food, drink, tea, cakes and even gift bags!

And frankly, given the amount of changing, primping, and even hair dying that went on at last year’s event, we’ve given in and decided to open a DIY Nail Bar so you can strip off your old colour and prepare to paint the town and your toes red (or Absolutely Alice, or Pompeii Purple, or…). We’ll provide all the varnish, L’Onglex and cotton wool you can eat; just sit down with your fingers and toes and get your glam on.

As in previous years, tickets are €17 and must be pre-booked on the honour system. If you don’t know anyone, don’t worry; the whole point is to meet other women bloggers and make friends before the awards. It’s a great, fun and buzzy afternoon, and you are genuinely welcome.

Here come the girls, baby…

What: The L’Onglex Ladies’ Tea Party
Who: You. A pre-event mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers.
When: Saturday, 27 March from 4 – 7 PM
Where: The absolutely fabulous g hotel
Why: Food, drink, nail painting, general merriment
How: Tickets are €17 per person and are limited to 40.
Registration & Info: NOW OPEN

Please ask questions here or follow @LadiesTeaParty on Twitter :)

I often joke that Twitter is my only source of news these days, but there is some news I’m simply unprepared to hear. I was absolutely horrified today to learn of the death of Debbie Metrustry, known up and down the Irish internet as @debbiemet.

In our first interactions, I didn’t know her last name was Metrustry and thus the source of her username. In my mental shorthand for people, she was Debbie Well Met, because absolutely everyone who had the pleasure of meeting her loved her. I’m not kidding about that. I know people say it all the time of those who have passed on, but in the snarky, gossipy, tight-knit world that is the Irish internet, I don’t know a single person who didn’t spontaneously smile and have a good word to offer whenever her name was mentioned.

Death is a cheater, but in her case seems particularly perverse. Debbie was young; sure, there was the occasional complaint about arthritic bones, but she was overflowing with enthusiasm and purpose. We all give lip service to the idea that “you only have one life” but Debbie had, in the last two years, really grabbed hold of that reality and made drastic changes to turn her life into what she wanted it to be. She was working through a career transition, was  newly dedicating herself to running, she had started a major move from Dublin, and she’d just bought land for her dream eco-house in Tipperary.

In many regards, she was just (re)starting her life; it seems cruel beyond belief that she will not live out the dreams she was building while the rest of us are left here, free to carry on in our own lives with efforts that seem so weak compared to her heroic mountain moving.

I was looking forward to seeing her again in three weeks, and at the moment I still cannot believe I will not.  I’m quite sure we’re scheduled for lunch in March and quite sure she’ll pop up in my Twitter DMs any moment now. Anything else is incomprehensible; when she’s not there, I know I will think of her as just away, dancing until dawn.

I have called the funeral home but there is still not a date, time, or specific information about services for her and details are below. Regardless of those arrangements, I’ve checked in with a few mutual friends and there will be a BTW (Blogger, Twitter, Whatever) meetup in her honour, most likely on the day of her services. I’ll post more information when it’s available but for the moment, like so many others, I simply cannot believe we’re making plans around the funeral of this woman.

Because really, she’s supposed to be here, dancing into her future.

Funeral Arrangements:
Viewings: Sunday and Monday until 8 PM
Kirwans, 21-23 Fairview Strand, Dublin 3 [map]
Service: Tuesday, 16 February, 2010 at 2 PM
Glasnevin Crematorium Chapel [map]
Burial immediately following

BTW Meetup:

Tuesday, 16 February 5 PM onwards
Le Cirk, 32 Dame Street [web]
Buses from Glasnevin: 140 [map]
Please RSVP at BTW [here] or add your name here.

Here’s a really common scenario:

You get a new client and they have a great product but no brand. Let’s say they make, I dunno, cow print toys or clothing or something, so you futz around for a while and decide to call the company Cowlabunga. (Just roll with me here.) You get to work and develop strong visuals for print and web and awesome messaging for use everywhere. The client loves everything, and then – after having stared at this shit for 60 hours – they have a crisis of faith.

Normally, these crises are some combination of the following:

1. They get hung up on the pronunciation. Is it cow-la-bunga or cool-a-bunga? Will people get confused? Frankly, it doesn’t matter – you say potato, I say patatoe, but everybody is clear about what vegetable we’re discussing. Is Vimeo pronounced vi-may-oh or vi-me-oh? I have no idea and care even less; I can spell it, find it, and host my videos on it, so whatever – it works.

2. They get literal with the logo. People who are new at starting or leading companies are universally obsessed by their own logo. And the telecom guy always wants a phone, the real estate guy always wants a house and everyone in anything to do with discounts always wants to dick around with currency symbols.

Even in 1971, Nike’s designer knew you don’t do that. Your logo does not need to be literal to be clear. Nobody thinks McDonald’s sells arches, and nobody thinks Nike sells swooshes.

A logo need not – and often arguably should not – be representative of the specific product the company sells or the specific service it delivers. That is not the job of a logo. Thinking that the logo is what defines a brand or is even the most important part of the brand experience means that someone has no understanding of what branding is and probably should not be trusted to market a company.

3. They get hung up on the logo. Once the logo is agreed, clients tend to think it’s cast in stone. It shouldn’t be, because you absolutely can play with it. Google does. The BBC does. The New Museum of Contemporary Art does, too, rendering the words NEW and MUSEUM in a consistent type face and sticking whatever they want between them.

The static logo is dead, and thank God for that because if I have to fuck up one more website, flyer or poster because some sponsor’s logo MUST have a 30mm white surround, I’m going to start taking hostages. Your logo is a tool, not a monolith; it’s there to be used, not preserved as a sacred cow.

I would suggest, however, that you not call your company Cowlabunga. It sounds like a foot disease.

I was absolutely delighted to pick up a Best Ebusiness gong at the Golden Spiders on behalf of LouderVoice for Business. This project didn’t go into my portfolio straight away because it wasn’t really a design job; with very, very little time available, we used a commercial WordPress template, customised it where needed, and lorried the rest of the time into tackling the positioning and communication issues that needed sorting.

In an inspired moment, the site got a new strapline (“Fuel Your Sales with Trust”), followed by a clearly demarcated product line up, new copy for everything, and a widget and API sign-up process. LouderVoice was called a “a strong winner in this year’s ebusiness category” and I’m delighted for them.

Katherine Nolan and I are delighted to announce that WordCamp Ireland, Ireland’s first conference for WordPress,  is officially launched. We’ve spent a mad few days talking to venues, sponsors and speakers and all systems are go: we’ll be taking over Langton’s Hotel in Kilkenny on March 6th and 7th, 2010 along with 35 speakers, 200 attendees and a metric tonne of swag.

It is going to be a great conference with both excellent speakers and loads of social activities so you don’t sort of get stranded in a corner (we hate that) and is specifically family-friendly so you can bring the whole gang. The venue is also handicap accessible and utterly amazing – we are so excited it’s all come together like this.

This site was a snap to do because Katherine and I work pretty much flawlessly together. I did the pretty, she did the clever, and we’re in total agreement about everything to do with conference organising. It’s like marriage, only perfect :)

PS: Follow @WordCampIRL on Twitter for updates, or see the blog.