I’ve been working from home for the past three years now and I have now come across all the good and bad things about working from my home office. It’s a great thing to be able to tell someone that you work for yourself out of your house, however sometimes it’s nice to get out of the house and out in the city. There are tons of pros and cons as to why you should or shouldn’t work from home, but I think that once you get the hang of it, working from home can be the best thing ever.

Who Shouldn’t Work From Home
There are certain personality types that should just not bother trying to work from home. Maybe I shouldn’t say “personality type” rather I should say “motivation level”. You definitely need to be self-motivated in order to work from home. There is no boss telling you to wake up, take a shower, get dressed and sit down at your computer and start being productive. No one is there to tell you that your next report is due on Friday at 10AM. So if no one is there to tell you these things – you must do it yourself. Self-discipline is almost a MUST if you plan on working from home. You need to have the discipline to make yourself work, even though you might find yourself watching an extra 30 minutes of that soap opera you started watching while eating your lunch. It’s easy to get distracted too!

Avoiding Distractions
At home, distractions abound. If you have kids – you need to get daycare. You will not get any work done while trying to manage your kids, no matter how good they are. Besides that, there are household chores that can temp you too. It’s easy to say, “I’ll start work right after I finish the laundry” or “I just need to run out to the store for a few things” in the middle of your day, then never get to finish that important project. All in all, the best thing you can do for yourself is to give yourself a distraction-free environment. Set up your office to eliminate any sounds or visual cues of other things that might distract you from your work. If you have a quite part of the house – that is where you need to set up shop – not in the middle of the living room. On a side-note, there is a great resource for moms who work from home – WorkFromHomeMoms.com -this site has some great articles about working from home as a mother.

You’re the One Held Accountable
Even if you sub-out some of your work to freelancers or another agency to complete parts of your project, your client doesn’t know that. They hired YOU and expect the project to come from you. Make sure you deliver.

Get On a Schedule
Putting yourself on a consistent schedule will definitely make you more productive. If you wake up at different times of the day, go to bed at completely random hours of the night, and take lunch breaks at all hours of the day then your work will suffer. A consistent schedule is a boon to making sure your work is also consistent and of the highest quality. A good schedule will make sure you get into a good groove and clients will also respect your hours once you establish them. This sets the ground rules for when clients can call you.

Avoid Mid-Day Facebook Posts!
Posting to facebook during the middle of the day allows your friends (and clients) to see what you are doing during the middle of the day – usually when you are supposed to be working. Now for most people this might not be that big of a deal. However make sure you asses your situation and see if posting to your profile will get you in trouble or not!

Overall, working from home is a great thing to do, so long as you can make it work for you. It can be tempting to want to dive right in, especially if you have a crappy office job right now!

So I recently found a nice little website with reviews of golf simulators and which ones would be the best to buy. Now I’ve got no budget for a large, expensive projector screen golf simulator to be installed in some new addition onto my house, but I would love to see what’s out there. The thought of being able to play full rounds of golf from right within my house is pretty appealing.

I’ve tried using the Wii system and was less than impressed. The Wii golf game has poor graphics and doesn’t even require a full swing to make the ball go anywhere. Oh and you can’t even use a golf club. You have to use the standard controller or add their lame plastic golf club extension to the controller. Either way, using the controller is nowhere near the feel of a golf club.

While we’re talking about gaming consoles, I did try a system that worked with PlayStation 3 – it had a golf ball tethered to a pole that spun around when you hit it with a golf club. I liked this feature because I could actually use a REAL golf club, however the feedback from the game was just OK. The graphics were poor and I’m not sure how accurate the game was.

Now when it comes to real golf simulators, I tried out the aboutGolf simulators at the PGA Show this year – those are the real deal. The screen is enormous and extremely life-like. I just had to write this since I just read that article on golfsimulatorsforsale.com – good stuff!

I was recently featured on MO.com! This website is a great new site that is currently being developed to highlight entrepreneurs. The owner of the website, Brian Null, is a fellow entrepreneur and big-hitting domainer. As you can tell from his domain name – MO.com (every 1,2,3 and 4 letter domain in the .com is currently purchased) he knows what he is doing. He also used to own golfcourses.com as well as several other solid URL’s.

So check out his website and check my website soon for an updated look and better content!

This past Sunday night marked the first time since World War II that the St Simons Island Lighthouse has been turned off! In case you don’t know, the Lighthouse is an icon for St Simons Island – it stands at the southern tip of the island, overlooking the village, the pier and the view across to Jekyll Island. The historical society had a nice little function at the SSI pool to commemorate the occasion and got the entire community involved.  A band was there, free food was provided by Barbara Jean’s, and tons of people came to the event!

We took some pictures as the sun was going down and we also climbed to the top of the lighthouse! This happened to be my first time up in the lighthouse. There was a great view from the top and I got a few nice pictures while up there. Check them out:

While at my buddy’s wedding in Wisconsin, my wife took some great pics and I’ve started to mess around with the creative touches in Photoshop.  I ran across a super easy way to give your pictures a little pop by making them black and white except for select areas that you want to keep color! Check out the picture below:

So here is the basic tutorial for all you newbie Photoshop users:
1. Duplicate the layer:

2. On the duplicated layer go to Image>Mode>Grayscale. (Do your color correcting before you turn the pic to black and white for best results)

3. Now here’s the easy part: Select the Eraser tool and simply erase the Grayscale layer wherever you want to see color! The background layer will show through as color. Use the [ and ] keys to control the size of the eraser to make sure you get fine detail and don’t erase anything that you didn’t want to.

Bonus: Now let’s say that you want to make the background a littled blurred and out of focus so as to draw more attention to your subject:

5. Duplicate your top layer and go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Adjust the radius to about 1.4 pixels. If you really want the artsy look, raise the pixels to something like 7px.

6. Now get out your eraser tool again and you can simply erase the main subject that you want to keep in focus. All you’re really doing is revealing the layer underneath again!

That was a super simple technique, yet it can really make your images look great. Keep on the lookout for more tips coming from a new design and web development firm – AO Studios.

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On my recent trip to Chicago and Wisconsin, I stayed at a very cool hotel under the Starwood brand. The hotel was an “Aloft” hotel. Weird name, but they have a very modern vibe about them. One of the little perks of staying at this nuevo hotel was the 3 magazines that they provide for you in the bathroom area (they were all NEW magazines, so don’t worry, they weren’t tainted by some other bathroom reader before me). So one of these magazines was a “Wired” magazine. It was the first time I actually read one and I was super impressed! Not at the actual writing or anything, but the fact that they pointed out how UNCOOL it is to wear your bluetooth headset while not doing anything. Check it out:

Right on the cover they explain that even BRAD PITT can’t pull off the bluetooth headset. So I just wanted to give this magazine mad props for finally letting the world know that the bluetooth headset is queer!

Tasteful Temptations, a great catering company based out of St Simons Island, GA needed their website re-designed so that they could update the website whenever they want.  Well, I made that happen.  I transfered their existing site from XHTML to a Content Management System.  I added some Javascript on the site to make it a little cleaner too.  There’s only one more addition that I need to make on the site, and that is a flash file for the Cakes page. (Wait till you see their awesome wedding cakes!)  So if you need a web designer, then contact me and I will build you  a website that is easy to update yourself!

I just finished another website for a custom drums company based out of Greensboro, NC.  This custom drum builder needed a web presence other than his Myspace page and he came to Avenue 3 Media to design and develop his website.  He wanted a website to showcase the custom drums that he has built and to convey his military themed business.  The word OPFOR is an acronym for something in the military (I still don’t know what it means!) and he wanted it to subtly be displayed throughout his website.  So I gave him some neutral colors and a text that really pops.  We also added a nice little slideshow with a bunch of his work to showcase.

So thanks to Big Jerm for the referral and I hope Opfor Drums continues to keep growing!

We all know that St Simons Island, GA is a great place to live, and if you didn’t know that, then now you do.  It’s a terrific little island just north of Jacksonville, Florida that seems to lag behind the times when it comes to the ever evolving modernity of urban life.  Now, in no way am I saying that St Simons has ever been urban – far from it actually – but it does represent a population of transplants and drifters from all over the US, especially urban areas.  Sometimes it seems like people here would love to have the urban lifestyle, yet mostly everyone settles for the small town, quaint island life that is truly indicated by the 7 degrees of seperation that everyone has in common.  Actually, it’s more like 3 degrees of seperation around here – everyone seems to know everyone in one way, shape, or form. Either a friend of a friend or a co-worker of your friend will seem to know someone else on the island! But my point that I am trying to make through all this is – St Simons businesses, for the most part, have TERRIBLE websites. Like websites that were built by 9th graders in 1997.  Yea, that bad.  And the reason that I hate it for them – is that these businesses are fantastic! There are some excellent little stores and some pretty good size businesses on this island that just have bad looking, poorly developed websites.  It’s my belief that a website should represent a company’s brand image and offer useful information to the customer.  Well, it’s a shame at what some of the local businesses websites offer around here.

Now, you might be asking, “is he knocking other local web designers?”  Maybe.  I don’t personally know any other web designers on the island, but if they haven’t updated the look of their clients’ websites by now, then they are just stealing money from them.  It’s ok to lag behind the times when it comes to urban sprawl and pace of life around here – but the web isn’t waiting for anyone.  It will always keep moving and if you aren’t moving with it – you’re standing still on a busy highway.

Anyway, that’s my take and I’m gonna continue to learn as much as I can and make better and better websites.