"Passion," Cyndi said. I hadn't seen her for maybe months, and we go way back. I hadn't really asked a question directly. We just crossed trails in the produce section at the grocery store Saturday and so we stopped to chat. She was talking about managing her office and inspiring her staff, and she kept coming back to the word.
I wouldn't have thought of the word when I was looking about for a company to do the Barker Bass website, 5 or 6 years back. I just knew I wanted it to look good.
Just like every neighborhood seems to have a guy with a Sears tablesaw in the middle of his garage which he refers to as his "cabinet shop", so does every extended family have someone who "has done a whole lot of web sites and he/she could do yours, and fast too!" Right. And they do it in their spare time, no doubt. If you pursue this line of thought, I'll guarantee you'll find a bunch of not so good sites and many broken hearts before you're done looking.
If you have not been to the Barker site, you can get a flavor of it by looking at the header here. More? www.barkerbass.com
Turn down your subwoofer, ignore the flash, and look around like you had just been ushered into a garden. It's beauty everywhere, at least that's how I see it. And I don't say that because it's mine, I say that because the man behind it, Ian Blackie, envisioned the colors first, passionately, and has done the work since. We talked about palette before we had prepared a word of text or talked about taglines or discussed what I wanted the site to do.
Ian comes from printing. Sounds odd, doesn't it. You'd think a good web designer would come from techie stuff, from flash and html and the eerie Land of Codes. If I had it to do again--not likely--I'd look for someone with an eye for color. It all seems to start from there, and if there's passion at the center of good, there can be only one outcome.
Even now, after years, if I am imagining an addition to a page, we'll talk about the colors and how we want it to tie together and where we want the first impressions to land.
That might seem odd for a site that's about an instrument that makes music, but it's not. Our concern is about first impressions.
I get a lot of compliments on the site. They're usually in the superlative, and have never been followed with a conditional or exception. I'm remiss in not passing these sweeping words of praise on to Ian, who is at
http://www.adwebcommunications.com/index.php
His passion shows in his work and we shouldn't let that slip by. We need passion at the center of good more than ever.
