I drove north from Los Angeles and headed into the hills, aiming for a small town called Ojai. It’s the second time I’ve been to Ojai. I spent a week there several years ago, which was one of the formative experiences of my career. I spent a week studying web design at a training facility called Lynda.com, pretty much the gold standard for Web training in the world. Founded by Lynda Weinman, Lynda.com is now primarily a online training resource for Web designers and other people who need to use computers at a very high level. But when she first began the school in Ojai it was a classroom training environment where people would go and study for a week. I had a wonderful time there and learned a lot. I was very sorry when she closed the hands-on training in Ojai, primarily as a result of the sharp decline in travel after 911.

Anyway back to today. This trip to Ojai was purely for rest and relaxation; I stayed at a place called the Lavender Inn, which was previously The Moon’s Nest Inn. It’s changed a little since I was there and is now under new management, but it still is a wonderful place to stay. Two or three of my favorite haunts are still open in Ojai, including a very friendly little British teashop where I was able to indulge my taste for sausage rolls.

I’m not certain that the work was terribly effective. The day when you first meet with a new crowd of people, it can take a while until you start working efficiently together. Everyone is sort of feeling their way a little bit to see who has something intelligent to say, who should be listened to, and who perhaps should just be nodded at occasionally and smiled at. Once that process was out of the way we did start to get some real work done. There are some very, very smart people in this group, and I think it can go very well.

As is always the case with these kind of meetings, everyone really wants to talk about how the website will look, about the typeface, about clever bits of technology and about all the bells and whistles that are exciting about websites. But until we decide exactly what the website is supposed to achieve, all of that is irrelevant.

Separating form and function is, in my experience, the most important part of getting a big web project completed. It just doesn’t matter what the site looks like or what technology we are going to use to build it, if we haven’t decided “Who is the site for?”, “What information do they want to get from the site?”, and “Who is going to be feeding the side with content?”

It is possible that I may have bored a couple of people with my constant refrain of “Yes, but what do you want the site to do?” Fortunately, there were enough people who had the same mindset as me. I think part of the problem is that some of the local franchises don’t have any techies on their marketing staff and so the person they had sent from marketing was coming at it from a different angle to those of us who yes, work for marketing, but are in fact more involved in the technical side of things.

But by the end of the two days we had managed to hammer out a pretty effective plan of action, and it was agreed the next meeting will be in a couple of months. By that point, we will have completed user surveys in local franchises and will have a much better sense of what exactly the website is supposed to achieve.

Oh, Chicago? It was great fun, and in a future post I’ll talk about the great restaurant we ate at downtown.

Outside of work, I read extensively, with an emphasis on current affairs and politics. When it comes to fiction, my tastes are pretty low brow; I like to read mysteries and thrillers, particularly series mysteries, where there are 10 or 12 books to enjoy in a row. Recently I’ve been reading Robert Parker avidly… I think all of his books are just terrific, but I do particularly like the Spenser novels.

I’ve been reading Stuart Woods a lot recently also, and I think many of his books are very good. But I do find his character Stone Barrington just a bit too precious. Lots of writers go in for brand dropping, but really I don’t care what Champagne he drinks, I don’t care what count the cotton sheets are in his hotel, and I certainly don’t care how much he paid for his watch. Like I say, good page turners, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Stone Barrington slip on a big pile of pig poop one-time and mess up his suit.

I try and get outside occasionally as well. Never was a big fan of team sports, but I enjoy cruising around on my bike. I have a rather unusual bike, a sort of semi-recumbent, made by a company called BikeE. Unfortunately they went out of business some years ago, so this bike is going to have to keep rolling, because there’s no way I’m going back to a regular crotch cruncher like I used to ride.

I enjoy all different types of food, some of them a bit too often according to the button on my jeans. I’m a huge fan of pizza, and I also love Mexican food. On my one trip to California a couple years ago, I ate two foods that I had never eaten before… fish tacos, and chilli fries from Fat Boy.

Fish tacos are a wonderfully healthy meal… bite sized chunks of fish, wrapped up in a tortilla along with cabbage slaw, some seasoning, and some dressing. Not much in there for a nutritionist to object to.

Chilli fries are another matter completely. A big portion of french fries, with a ladle of chilli slapped straight on top; absolute heaven, but it’s like making a down payment at the cardiologist’s office. But boy are they good.

Not a lot of fish tacos in my neck of the woods here, so I’m looking forward to getting back to California on a trip later this year.

What are some of your favourite foods? Drop me a comment and let me know.

We will be staying downtown, and I gather that the hotel that we’re staying at is pretty nice. There are seven of us involved from cable companies all around the country, and this first meeting is primarily to discuss how to gather the specs for the site. On the one hand, we all have fairly similar needs for this website, but each local franchise is a little different, and so the site will need to be pretty flexible.

I’m not one to turn down a free trip (I don’t travel very much… if I did, maybe I wouldn’t be so excited about going to Chicago), but to be quite honest, I’m not sure that much useful work is going to get done at this first meeting. The purpose seems to be partly to have us meet face to face and establish a relationship, so that we can then work more effectively as we collaborate long-distance through IM, blog, or some sort of project management software.

I guess we’ll have a little free time, and certainly a couple of evenings to eat out as a group, so if anyone has some suggestions for a don’t miss restaurant in downtown Chicago, please drop me a comment.

So that’s where I come in. My job, at least for the next few months, going to become more of a training and resource position. I have a few weeks to get together with our in-house training people, who spend a great deal of their time working with our customer service reps, and together we going to design a training programme. All the people involved in adding content of the website.

Even the design side of things isn’t going to completely disappear. I’ll no longer be designing the local site, but I will be involved with a small group working at a national level, to help develop the site for the entire company. If I handle this correctly. It may actually be a very good thing. This is going to lift me out of the “code monkey” aspect of web design and pull me a little further into the management, project design, and speccing of website projects. I didn’t expect to start doing this kind of work so soon; I’m actually quite excited.

Oh, and the best thing? The small group helping to design the national site will be meeting several times this next year at some rather nice spots around the country. At the very least, I should be able to manage a couple of trips to California. Yep, looks like there is an upside to this after all.

And that was the good bit of the day.

It seems that my company has decided to take a whole new direction for their website. So instead of producing it locally, they are going to be simply producing a local version of a site for the national company. It’s actually a pretty good idea, and it was a pretty good idea, when I first suggested at a conference three years ago. Of course, nobody paid any attention then.

Anyway, despite my prophetic brilliance, it’s not clear where this change of direction is gonna leave me. One of the big advantages of producing the website this way is that it makes it possible for almost anybody, with permission, to add content to the website. So the people responsible for the channel lineup in each given neighbourhood can make those changes directly onto the website. Similarly, the people in marketing who come up with new offers of special deals for premium channels , will have their own access in order to make those changes on the homepage.

The part of me that wants normal people to be able to use the web easily and effectively thinks this is great. The part of me that needs to pay the rent next month, and that is a little concerned about future employment, thinks it’s not quite so great. We’ll see how things unfold.

In the meantime, I’m going back to bed.

I’m not real interested in genealogy, but an uncle of mine who’s taken a look at some family history reckons that the name dates from Middle English… it may have been a nickname, either for somebody who really was kind of angelic in their behaviour, or how they looked, or that perhaps they played the part of an angel in a pageant. I suspect we’ll never really know, but I kind of like that as an explanation.

I suppose I’ve always been a little bit self-conscious about the name, and it has affected my behaviour sometimes. For instance, I would never have done anything in high school or college where I might risk getting arrested. Apart from my parents, being absolutely insanely mad at me, I just couldn’t face the headlines in the local newspaper. You can see them now. “Fallen Angel”, or “Not Such an Angel After All.”

Nope, I was never gonna risk that.

No not really. I think it ought to be a little longer than that. I started this blog early mainly as a reminder to myself about some of the projects I am involved in at work. Now already that can be a little bit complicated, because there are limits to what I want to say about my work. I’ve heard too much about people who get into trouble with their employers because of stuff they write about their work. Don’t want that.

So, let’s decide what I can say. Jacob Angel is a real name, but none of the other names on here are going to be real, because I don’t want to upset or offend anyone. I work in the marketing department of a cable TV company in the Northeast of the United States. I have a rather strange job there, because I’m as much of a geek as I am a marketing guy; I’m the one responsible for writing and building our website, and for e-mail marketing to our customers.

I like the work, but I’m definitely interested in stretching my abilities a bit and trying some new things. I’d like to experiment with subnormal database driven solutions, and I’d also like to learn more about optimisation. Okay I’ve got myself started - time for a Diet Coke, and to get back to work.