If you’ve ever felt stifled by outside influences when trying to be creative or problem-solve, John Cleese’s experience, observation, and advice may confirm that you’ve been right all along. And those outside forces have been only feeding their own egos. Or maybe what’s been blocking you is your own inner voice.

John Cleese gives you “5 factors” that can help you live more creatively and solve problems, along with observations on how groups work – and don’t work – at solving problems.

This is worth all 36 minutes of viewing:

If you only have time for the short version of John Cleese’s talk, here are 13 minutes on the 5 factors to change your creative life:

I discovered a new blogger and found Mark to be insightful and a skilled writer, speaking in plain English for his readers. If you’re interested in WordPress, I suggest you check out his blog.

It’s an exciting time in the website building process: your website looks amazing…in your head. But all you have in front of you is a blank screen and a blank stare. How do you get started?

If your new site will be in WordPress, you’ll need a “theme” to make your site beautiful. There are multiple routes to a theme, so here are the pros and cons of each.

Read more.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

The Santa Cruz Web Developers turned 3 this year!

Thanks to Frank and Merrie Ann Turner, our anniversary parties have stepped up several notches. They offer up their lovely backyard, and Merrie Ann always throws in some delicious treats, too – she’s a FABULOUS cook! Thank you, Frank and Merrie Ann!

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I finally found a great web browser statistics site. This came through SitePoint, an essential resource for web publishers.

The stats site is StatCounter. They default to a worldwide count, and you can refine the information by country, browser version, mobile, etc. See their FAQs page for details on what methodology they use, etc.

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Safari 5 came out with the most helpful tool I’ve ever seen: Safari Reader.

Press a button and the main content of the page pop out, leaving behind the sidebars, ads, and other minutiae.

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Tim still has such passion for the work. It’s infectious.

“Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.”

- Tim Berners-Lee

Many people think web development is as easy as creating a Word document and, therefore, should be cheap. There are free and cheap wysiwygs (‘what you see is what you get’ programs), or a brother/mother/friend will do it for free. But my clients have come to me with serious problems with these. One repeating example is that the contact form does not work—this is an expensive problem because potential clients can’t reach you, and feel ignored when you don’t return their email. A coder can troubleshoot and fix issues like this and get you moving forward.

My clients are keeping me busy these days, so until I have a chance to spell it out for you directly, here are a couple of articles on the subject for your perusal:

• Why Do Websites Cost So Much Money?
• Hidden Costs in Website Development Projects: Four Key Tasks that are Consistently Underestimated.
• Why Does a Website Cost So Much?