First & Sixth is the second restaurant opened by Mike Caudill and Eric DiLauro. Their first restaurant was Table 50 that I also created the website for in 2009.

The website is built on WordPress and has a custom theme made specifically for the restaurant. The design was created by Ralston Cyrus of Racecar Media Design, who is an awesome web designer in Washington, DC.

The design conveys the down-to-earth and organic feel of the restaurant. The restaurant’s logo has the leaf theme, which is repeated also in the site’s footer. Because of the importance of the Patrick Henry building, a picture of the building was included as a design element.

First & Six and its lounge, Penny Deux, have a decent following on Facebook, so I wanted to integrate the Facebook social plugin to the sidebar. As the restaurant’s gets more reviews on sites like Yelp.com, Urbanspoon and the like, those logos will be more prominently displayed on the site.

Some basic keyword research was also conducted prior to writing the copy for the site and most of the content is optimized for search terms relevant to the restaurant.

My old machine sporting Intel Core 2 Duo ran Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6). I hadn’t felt the need to upgrade to Lion, especially after the news of problems with the OS. My new laptop came with Lion installed, so I really didn’t even have the option of running the older operating system. Sure there were times (especially when it got overheated) when it started freezing up, but for the most part there were no problems.

Frankly, I was very disappointed with the speed of the new MacBook Pro – toggling between applications, hell, even opening a new tab in Chrome caused the computer freeze for several seconds. It got progressively worse, and at the end I thought I had teleported back to the old Windows 95 days. It was getting to a point where something had to be done.

So when your Mac starts slowing down, as most users know, upgrading RAM is the easiest step to take. And what’s the obvious first step? Probably Apple Store. I was floored when I saw the price for the upgrade from 4 to 8Gbs, it had to be one of the most outrageously priced products ever. Gordon Gekko once said that “Greed is good,” but I think Apple took it to a whole new level; Seriously, Apple?

Having spent $1,400 on a laptop with insufficient RAM, I definitely was not going to fork over another $400 to make it run better. I looked around and ended up getting the memory from Amazon to the tune of $48 bucks. Thanks to Amazon Prime, I had it the next day and installed it in about 10 minutes thanks to the awesome and detailed instructions on how to upgrade the memory yourself on apple.com.

If the upgrade retails at $40, Apple should be able to ship the computer with 8Gb with a minimum effect on the price. So why don’t they? Some might say it’s a smart and calculated business move by Apple; Most users will end up making the upgrade – and will do it at their own expense. This combined with the assumption that a large part of Apple users won’t even consider looking elsewhere and make Apple store their first (and probably only) stop in the process of upgrading the memory. Cha-ching!

This overpriced upgrade will undoubtedly make Apple a lot of money, but I think they do it at the risk of pissing off many customers. Especially those who end up looking around and finding it else where for about 1/10th of the price (and blog about it).

I guess it’s only normal that Lion is much, much hungrier for memory than Snow Leopard is. The same trend is found also in nature; according to Wikipedia, Lions usually eat about twice as much as Snow Leopards do.

Note to Apple: Pack a little more meat in the lunchbox when you sent it out to your customers. I think you’ll keep your cubs happier in the long run.

Because their fleet consists of new, high-quality vehicles, the main point of the site was to offer the users an opportunity to see multiple pictures of each of the cars as well as their specifications. These were made very prominent on the individual car pages.

Since many of Lacara’s clients are international, the site had to be designed bilingual. This functionality was achieved through WordPress qTranslate plugin. The car specifications as well as the rental prices are saved in the database in WordPress post custom fields. Using custom fields vs. plain text allowed me to easily create the multilingual specifications and prices list. I used language detection to determine which language to use for each label. These text strings are fetched from compiled .MO language files.

This site also utilizes a custom plugin called “Lacara Manager,” which allows the business to easily maintain the pricing information as well as update the specials page.  The plugin adds a dashboard widget that shows all relevant links on the home page of the admin area.

Check out Lacara Helsinki car rentals here!

Aeron "the Awesome"

It wasn’t until I started working from home when I realized how important piece of work equipment a proper work chair is. After suffering with crazy pains from sitting in a bad chair, I invested in what I think is the best chair ever: Aeron by Herman Miller.

Realizing “I must buy myself a new chair” is not always evident or quick. The furniture at my last full-time job was not good, but I managed to stay pain-free by staying in semi-constant motion; I always preferred stairs to elevator and walking over to a colleague to ask something instead of putting it into an email. Because it was all I knew, I did not realize how important staying in motion is for your health. That didn’t happen until I started working for myself from a home office and I found myself sitting in my chair for hours on end, which really began to take its toll on my physique.

My old home-office work chair was from Ikea, a crappy cheap piece of sub-par furniture masquerading as a work chair. I found it ironic that the description for the chair on Ikea’s website says the following:

Height adjustable; easy to adjust for a comfortable sitting posture.

The only adjustment on the chair was the height. Sorry, Torbjörn. I like your Swedish optimism but most of us need to adjust more than just the sitting height to find a ‘comfortable sitting posture.’ Together with the new aches, reading this article about how “sitting kills,” finally made me realize I had to invest in a proper work chair.

I read reviews on chairs from Staples and the like and even visited a store to test-sit a few. While some of them felt good, I was unimpressed by the quality. It was easy to believe the reviews that suggested such chairs would not last for more than just a couple of years.

Enter Aeron

Ultimately I realized my physical well-being wasn’t the right place to skimp. I understood that as much as I spend time sitting in my work chair, making the investment in a proper work chair would pay dividends in better health. I ended up going with Herman Miller Aeron chair. It was expensive, but I rationalized it by doing the math; if a $300 chair lasts me three years, it’s cheaper to buy a $725 Aeron, which has 12-year warranty. But let’s be real, even if the chair doesn’t last me a full dozen years, I still get to enjoy its sturdy craftsmanship and great adjustability. Plus the mesh keeps you nice and cool, something you cannot say about padded fabric or leather chairs.

Resisting the urge to save money and go bottom-of-the-line Aeron, I chose the model with adjustable arm rests and lumbar support. I didn’t want to risk being unhappy with the chair just because my body didn’t fit the fixed settings. When the chair was finally delivered, I fell in love with it immediately. The chair is awesome, I love the tilt-feature that the Ikea chair lacked completely. The adjustable arm rests and lumbar support are absolutely worth the money.

The old Torbjörn chair was out the door so fast it’s not even funny. As soon as the Aeron was assembled, I wheeled the old chair out of our apartment and into the recycling area of our building. My only regret is that I didn’t take a picture of it, so a screenshot from Ikea.com must do. Bye bye, Torbjörn, I won’t be missing you.

Torbjörn "the Terrible" from Ikea

Where C5 differs the most from WordPress is that the page layouts don’t include any content areas like WordPress pages do. Instead the layouts include areas where the user can add any number of content blocks. The blocks can be also different types, for example: plain text, HTML, or be a plugin-type of block that performs a certain function.

On one hand this allows the user to create a more complex page by mixing and matching different blocks content. With WordPress this would be possible only through extensive useof plugins and shortcodes. As a developer I like this approach because it also makes the content, well, more contained. Since the ares of where the user can enter content will also make it harder for the user to break the page inadvertently.

On the other hand this ‘content area’ approach can be a blessing in disguise; when setting up a new site, it can be challenging to make certain blocks appear on a set of pages.

C5 definitely has its strengths and is probably great for sites where the user wants the freedom to create complex, content-rich pages based within a predefined layout. Where it falls short of WordPress is its plugins and expandability and community support.

What I found most interesting was that after the first time the sales pitch played, instead of the usual prompt of “press ’1′ to hear more, press ’2′ to continue” the recording just gave the first option. What I found even more interesting was that after I didn’t press any key, the recording played again. Luckily after hearing the same pitch twice and two long, uncomfortable silences later, the an upbeat voice told me my card was ready to use.

The recording left me feeling like Bank of America is exploiting people’s fear of uncomfortable silences (and debt, of course) to trick them to sign up for something they most likely don’t need. Also because there were no other options, people must feel like they have to choose the only one given. It was clear that were employing the funnel tactic to get people to take the most profitable action for them. In this case I’m not sure if that’s really the most ethical thing to do. It would be different I had called about these kinds of services but I didn’t.

For Bank of America’s sake, I hope I happened to belong to a sample group for this recording and when the conversion rate aren’t good enough, they retire it and selling fear doesn’t become the norm in BoA’s marketing message.

I promise to refrain from any hanky panky
Or anything that would make anyone get cranky.
Anything I do with this connection that is lame,
I absolve Chelsea Market, et al, of any blame.

Agree and you’ll get out.
Disagree and you’ll just pout.

The purpose of Sisustyle.fi is to give the company a presence on the Internet as well as give Etti a platform to showcase her work.

The design of the website stemmed from print work the owner had had done. Unfortunately it did not work for the web as-is and we had to “webify” it to accommodate pages with varying length of content, for example.

This was a simple, straightforward project just to get Sisu Style on the web. I will be working with Etti in the future as she gets more content to put on the site.

The new website was built using WordPress and a custom theme. In addition to web development, I did the SEO work for this website. Going from virtual nonexistence in organic search results, the site ranks now in top 5 for most relevant key terms. With more geographically specific search terms the site ranks in top 3.

Initially, the customer wanted to set up Muuttoboxi.fi as an e-commerce website. The idea was that customers would place an ‘order’ for their rental. One of the problems with this approach are the variable delivery charges. Since each delivery and pickup has unique factors (time, distance, number of floors, elevator or stairs, etc.) it was impossible to set a price on the service during the checkout process.

After statistics began showing high cart abandon rates and poor conversion, we decided to switch the approach from an e-commerce site to a lead-generating one. The flow was simplified from a two-step checkout process to one pager, which immediately showed an increase in conversion. In addition to organic traffic, I set up an Adwords campaign to drive paid traffic to the site.