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.