Category: philosophy

WordPress Web Design for Therapist Elana Sabajon, MA, LMHC

Posted on by Stephen

Although my clients come from an array of professional fields, I work with therapists to build their business identities and websites the most. One of those clients is Elana Sabajon. She is an experienced therapist and has a full schedule, but I’m sure she leaves the door open for new clients.

Elana is a therapist that is unique to me from other therapists. Her empathy runs deep—caring for disadvantaged groups and individuals who have unique lifestyles and are underappreciated by mainstream society. She also applies unique techniques to her therapy such as the Hakomi Method. She offers therapy for individuals, couples and relationships, and families and parents.

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A Step by Step Guide to the WordPress Photo Gallery

Posted on by Stephen

After I have built a WordPress website for my clients, they often want to update and edit the site themselves. This step by step guide focuses on instructing business owners on how to edit their WordPress photo gallery. There are some key details to be aware of. Once I’ve pointed them out, editing your own WordPress photo gallery will be a breeze.

Important Non-Tech Tip:

The Gallery Module is like a carton of eggs and the images are the eggs. When editing, you need to be aware of which view you are in—the gallery view or the image view. When there are two icons showing (the gallery and the image icon), you are in Image editing. One icon only, the gallery icon, you are in Gallery editing. The right column settings change in relationship to whether you are in the gallery or an individual image you clicked on.

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Looking Back at 2023, Looking Forward to 2024

Posted on by Stephen

Illustration created for Johnny B Painting

Looking Back at 2023

2023 was personally, and for Schildbach Design, a great year. With the COVID pandemic behind us, and having spent my first full year living in a rural environment in decades, I’m able to focus more on my business and creative projects. Half way through the year, I developed a clearer picture of what my clients were needing. I’ll explain this with a percentage breakdown of what kind of work Schildbach Design did last year, including some personal work projects.

46% Web Design

WordPress sites continue to be what my clients need, or they are flexible and agree that because it is my specialty, I should build and design within a framework I know well. Almost half of my time at work is building websites, redesigning old sites, or adding additions to old sites.

19% Administration

Anyone who runs their own business knows how much administrative work is required. Almost 1/5th of my time is email, cleaning and organizing my computer and office, digital paperwork, record keeping, taxes, estimates, applications, and invoicing. All of this mundane work is essential for running my business.

17% Illustration

Partially separate from Schildbach Design, is my previous career of being an illustrator. Website illustration is an alternative to stock art if you have the budget. Unrelated to my client websites, I also create product illustration, children’s book illustrations, and editorial illustration part time.

8% Fine Art

Entirely separate from Schildbach Design is my fine art. Occasionally, I have art patrons who will commission me to create a painting for them. Or, I occasionally will create drawings for group gallery shows. In keeping with my attention to client work, the percentage of time I put toward these creative endeavors is small.

4% Graphic Design

I’ve been doing graphic design professionally for 30 years but there was very little request for it in 2023. The hardest part about this digital download economy we live in is fields like graphic design have been replaced by templates and downloading existing designs. Starting in 2023, AI has replaced creatives by typing a command line to create a logo. I am deeply saddened by this. I miss the times of David Carson and Milton Glaser, two graphic designers who taught me to think creatively and take risks.

4% Photography

It is quite laughable that I did as much architectural photography as I did graphic design considering I’m not a photographer. But, one of my web design clients needed architectural photography for his website portfolio, and I have a camera that can do wide angle shots for home interior photography.

1% Videography

Occasionally I will do videography for my clients. They are simple videos for social media and YouTube posts. I shoot the videos with my mirrorless camera, and do editing in Adobe Premiere.

1% Marketing Schildbach Design

Most of my clients are referrals and repeat clients, so I don’t need to market Schildbach Design very much. Marketing includes SEO, social media, newsletters, and print and online advertising I do to attract new clients. I’m grateful to my clients for all the referrals and repeat work!

Looking forward to 2024

Starting today, January 3rd, 2024, my rates for hourly work is going up from $75 an hour to $80 an hour. I will still offer the same web maintenance packages at 5% and 10% off my hourly rate.

About half way through 2023, I made a change to my business strategy that I will be continuing through 2024. Prior to July of 2023, I was putting a lot of energy into trying to get graphic design, illustration assignments, and new website builds because these are the most creative projects. I’ve become more of a realist in that I’m focusing more on what my clients need. The most important things I’ve found that my clients need is consulting, web maintenance, systems administration (hosting, domain, and email setup), production (posting site content), and increasing their visibility (SEO, newletters, social media). So, in 2024, I’m focusing on cleaning up existing websites and working on the peripheral tasks associated with a website (like search engine optimization), and utilizing the best tools to serve my clients.

Happy New Year!

I look forward to working with you in 2024.

2023 Rebranding of Schildbach Design

Posted on by Stephen

At this time, Schildbach Design is a sole proprietorship. I, Stephen Schildbach, own and operate Schildbach Design. I do almost all the branding and marketing, and only outsource if I’m over booked or my client needs a skill I can’t provide. Those revisiting the site, you probably noticed a completely new design.

Schildbach Design’s Business Identity from 2015-2022

Rebranding my own business in 2023 had a couple of core reasons:

These are arguably more serious times, with our society going through many layers of change during what is hopefully the tail end to COVID. In my personal life, I enjoy iconoclastic imagery, but it hasn’t felt right these past couple of years for my business to project that personality. I also have a serious side, and have decided to match the present times and send out a more serious mood in my branding.

My new logo is clear and direct, yet still shows my love for unique design

The other reason for my rebranding is people want clarity. In the last decade, websites, and even businesses, could be design and art experiences in and of themselves with no clear portfolios or branding message. This was attractive to a certain client, but now, because of the increased instability in our day to day lives, this kind of elusive branding seems to confuse and turn off clients. More than ever we are image-saturated and time-deficient. People increasingly want clarity, with a “show me the work” attitude.

WordPress 6.1 in 2023

Posted on by Stephen

More than ever before, I would recommend WordPress as your platform of choice for most website solutions. As we all know, new technologies are continually rendering old technologies obsolete. For several years there was a time when I was thinking Squarespace would put WordPress out of business. I was concerned about Squarespace’s popularity because, as a designer, Squarespace takes all the design choices out of the equation, making the work nothing but sliding boxes around on the screen. WordPress had the accurate reputation for being “complicated”, while Squarespace’s drag and drop builder was easy to use by even novice web users. It also did not help that WordPress is a prime target of attack from hackers due to it’s popularity.

In 2022 I saw a shift where WordPress’ beta visual editor was “catching up” to the ease of use that Squarespace provides. And, plugins like Wordfence were doing an excellent job warding off hackers, and technologies like Google’s recaptcha was stopping spam.

In 2023, I was confirmed that I had made the right choice continuing to double down on WordPress. Their new user interface and editor allows me to design anything, while still making it easy for me to had the maintenance over to clients if they choose to do the maintenance themselves. More often than not, I’ve found it to be better for me to continue maintaining the site, because most of my clients are too busy with their own business to add web maintenance to their montly tasks.

The new core of WordPress comes with a theme that can essentially replace most any other theme. Even though I feel badly for all the designers who made themes for WordPress anticipating this to be a never ending source of income, I was finding that this saturation of theme options was missing the point of design entirely. You don’t need thousands of design options to pick from, you need a designer who with a few key choices builds a design from the same provided “theme”. The 2023 theme does just that. I will be able to use this theme to build any design. It is essentially the scaffolding for a house, of a skeleton theme. I’ve built my 2023 redesign with this theme.

See how Schildbach Design can design your new site with this theme.