Official Opening of The Café Website

Though my first client web site, “The Café @ Groton Trading Company ”, has been accessible on the web for quite a while, today marks the official opening of the site, a snapshot of which you see here on the right. The site features the full menu for The Café, broken down into "food category" in the left-hand menu, and then a set of "pages" within each category which you navigate via a top-of-page menu — all of which I designed to convey the web experience, even though the actual menu is really a "huge long .pdf document" designed to be glossy-printed for hand viewing at your table.

More traditional features of the website include "customer feedback" where clients can tell us what they think as well as sign up for the newsletter, “Daily Specials ” on a chalkboard background (to match what is actually in The Café), and a Flickr-hosted "Photo Gallery" which we wanted in order to take advantage of The Café being inside an antique store making its ambiance is truly unique.

Customer Testimonials : Another unique feature of this web site is what you see on the left — the page that I called "Community". At a glance, it is a set of "feedback stories", each one generally displayed with a thumbnail picture of the client who submitted the feedback by going to another page (not shown) where you sign up for a newsletter and/or write whatever "story" you want to submit regarding your experience at The Café. Therein, a checkbox lets the author of such feedback consent to having his feedback made public on the “Community ” page, which is generated as dynamic content from the database each time someone brings up the page. For more details see moderated testimonials described here.

On a different technical note… I designed and built this website, soup-to-nuts, using Microsoft's .NET technology primarily because that way I end up with a site implementation that is fluid and completely under my control. Moreover, since extensive use is made of “page templates ”, even pervasive changes to the site — as clients get a better idea of the look and feel they want — sitewide changes can be made quickly and reliably.

Registering DigitalMediaMagik.com as a Business in Groton, Mass.

Yes !
On November 7^th, 2008, anticipating actual revenue from my first real clients for DigitalMediaMagik.com (my new company)… I went into the Town of Groton Town hall and registered my company as a "d.b.a.". And today I found this link, shown on the right, from which you can see that I really am "Groton business Id 1282". As you can see from my July 4^th blog article, it's taken me 5 months to get to this point and I'm very happy about it.

I still haven't come up with a better Icon (or "logo") for the company, so am still using the one you see on the left. Luckily, I didn't have to have that nailed down in order to register the company with the Town Hall. The Description that I did register was: Web site design and presentation, digital photography editing, multimedia presentations, DVD slide shows, digital music and story books printed on the web and DVD.

From here on in it's a matter of expanding my list of satisfied clients, which so far include a little Digital Photo Magik, updating content and a facelift (maintenance) on Mowrey's The Radical Forgivenesss web site, and a site I've just started building from the ground up, The Café in Groton, Ma.
 

Improved User Interface for Magik Pages

One of DigitalMediaMagik.com's product categories is what I call "Digital Photograph Magik", and there have long been a set of prototype pages where you can "see" the steps involved in transforming problematic digital images into exactly what you want them to be. I present this not because I expect clients to be able to fully understand what it takes to do this magic, but rather just to "plant the seed of these ideas" into people's mindset so that they can come up with similar things that they would like to make happen — i.e. contract me to do for them..

What's new as of a few days ago is not so much the intent or content of these pages, but rather a new User Interface that makes it a lot more obvious how to "drive" the pages, especially for folks not necessarily accustomed to cyberspace.

The rationale for the new UI is that it be intuitive and easy-to-use, even for a complete novice. Nevertheless, I present the above graphic in the hope that it can answer any questions you may have about the "September release" of these pages.

Hello world!

Welcome to Digital Media Magik — the place where ordinary people can get help with any sort of "family" project involving digital media that you could possibly imagine. This is my first posting, in a blog that I'm creating as a forum for the DMM community to talk about how the Magik has come alive in their world.

Sure, you already know how to take digital pictures, and you can probably even post them to public sites like Flickr or you can eMail them to family members as attachments. Maybe even that you'd like some help with. But what if you want to do "more" with them — such as put two of them together because you have one picture that's a great "family picture", but one very special person wasn't in that picture and you wish you knew how to "add them".

That's just one of the simplest things we can do for you at Digital Media Magik !!!

Visit our web site (www.DigitalMediaMagik.com) or contact me — Kevin.Pammett@DigitalMediaMagik.com — to find out more details.

— Kevin Pammett, July 31^st 2008.