My motives were selfish, but they didn’t have to do with getting any free consultation on my primary business. No, I knew that he was fun to have a gab with and I also wanted to twist his arm into helping me with a side project I’m launching called BoatHQ.ca. I’ve blogged about it here before, but it’s remained in a state of soft-launch for months now. Like most side-projects, it had been creeping along as I tried to define the best way to build the community, the services the site should offer and a myriad of other things. The bonus was that I knew that Norm was a boating enthusiast times ten. In fact, I knew that he was—and I’m paraphrasing him here—in the fourth year of a one year restoration of a classic wooden boat.

I wasn’t disappointed. Norm “got it” and provided me with some interesting insights about approach, and a willingness to have a look at the beta-site. Perhaps even down-the-road, he may even even help with the taxonomy of the forum and generate some content in the form of an article or 6 about his restoration project. (He won’t know until he reads this that I’ll be soon leaning on him to actually moderate the boat-building section, though I probably should have saved that part for another meeting in a bar.)

But wait, there’s more—

As we were talking he mentioned the importance of giving things away, and tossed me one: he had often thought there was a real value in distilling things down into their 3 basic elements. That people who knew stuff could usually lay them out simply as a “1, 2, 3″. We chatted about it and I agreed that it was a cool concept, but didn’t think much more than that. Until bed that night. Fueled by a couple of Guinness and perhaps some bad mustard, I came up with a concept of making a user-generated site for folks to do that very thing: share their knowledge of subjects as a series of 1, 2, 3’s. I wanted it to be a simple, straight-ahead interface. Serious or Funny, I wasn’t sure. Maybe both; maybe that would be decided by the users. I just wanted a simple way for people to add them.

Rollout was another question. How do I finance it? Who’s going to program it? Where would I find the time to manage it?

Within six Google searches I had my answers…

Wordpress To The Rescue

Knowing that I didn’t have the coding chops to start from scratch, my little project was going to have to rely heavily on some out-of-the-box solutions. Joomla! seemed like too much overhead, and I’m already knee-deep in it with the boathq.ca project. And I’ve been really impressed with Wordpress’ development of late. Well, that’s now the understatement of the year.

With a few well-chosen plugins, I was able to cobble together an app, a design and a cool little site. Here are the stars of the show:

I wanted to rollout quickly, so any hopes for a design phase were out of the question. I knew that I wanted to have the title fixed on the left, with the post titles being an extension of the domain name, so when I tripped over Allan Cole’s Boumatic I nearly wet myself. It was perfect: a child-theme for Thematic – which I love working with and protects me from update-hell down the road – and a stunner to boot. It deals with a fontstack that really sings on a Mac, and it really best suits very modern browsers, but this was a fun site, so I wasn’t going to start reaching down to the lowest common denominator.

Next up was a mechanism to handle user-submissions. Say hello to my little friend, TDO Mini Forms. This is a form plugin that allows almost everything I was looking for and more. Users can upload their lists, form design is straight-ahead, and it has functions I hadn’t even thought of – but will definitely be using. Best just to see it in action, as descriptions don’t do it any justice. Hell, I was even able to hack The Man in Blue’s wonderful WidgEditor into it, to make gorgeous little simple text editing for visitors. And if I can do it, anybody can.

Finally, I’ve been testing and trying some of the fabulous plugins available for WP – I’ll add proper credits once I get solid on which will remain in use.

So without further adieu: the123of.com … Do anything — in three easy steps. Check it out. I’d love to hear what you think!

We’ve also had our hand in with some other legal clients along the way. Perhaps most notably, we had the wonderful experience of working with Jordan Furlong on the redesign of his Law21.ca legal blog—one of the best examples of great blogging in the country. Our launch with him was a pleasure from conception to completion, and we were thrilled for him when he was honoured with the Clawbie for Best Canadian Legal Blog of 2008.

Throw in our work with some local clients such as Oakville family lawyer, Thomas H. Marshall through our long-time friend Shannon Anderson, and it seems we’ve been spending more time with lawyers than O. J. Simpson. Which reminds me of my days as a callow youth at U of T…

My original intention when studying at the University of Toronto hundreds of years ago was to continue through to law school. Now as it turned out, I became an actor instead—much to the delight of my parents, who still go slack-jawed at the recollection of my announcement to leave school—but I always maintained an interest in law, justice and government. Over a 25-year career in the film industry, I played a few lawyers in films and on television shows (‘I’m not a lawyer, but I play one on tv!’), and once even had a shot at recreating a Supreme Court address in the Sue Rodriguez Story “At The End of the Day” portraying real-life lawyer Chris Considine (here’s a link to the real thing.).

And now here I am spending an inordinate amount of time working with the legal community, helping them flow out onto the interweb and loving every minute of it. It’s interesting how things have kind of come full circle.

My Mom always said I’d end up with lawyers.

He often suggests using offshore assistants, but there are any number of things in our lives that could be handled only by someone in the physical world, located near to us. That’s why I have a feeling that Diane and Dan Meadowcroft’s endeavour is going to be a huge success. And why I was thrilled that they asked us to do their site! Nothing to see there yet, but this time next week we should have an intial site up and running!

BoatHQ.ca is intended to be a place where we can bring boaters of all kinds together to share resources, conversation and conviviality. A place to spend their time when their not at the helm, where they can learn about boating news and products and have a laugh once in awhile.

We’ve noticed that there were a few good boating sites and the odd manufacturer-specific forum,  but not really a social community—and boaters are very social beings it seemed to us.

So we have a Facebook-style social community set-up, and a separate forum built on PHPBB3, where people can get into more detailed multi-person threads and converstaions.

So head on over to BoatHQ.ca and join up. It’ll be fun!

2009 will be wonderful. Guaranteed.

MOXY

But there’s even better things on the horizon, and we’re just waking up to it now. It’s best to bring this discussion in the first person: not “we” Moxy Productions Inc. / MOXY Webworks, but me, Jesse Collins, owner-operator, chief-cook-and-bottle-washer, and author of this post. That’s because this discussion is as much about the distillation of business communications as it is about increasing reach and building community around what we do, or what we sell, or what service we provide.

First, the idea of doing any of this stems from believing in what we do. As a provider of a product or service, we start by being evangelists for what we create. Everything I’ve ever done in my life has come from absolute belief in being happy, from the belief that I would rather be a success at something I love than a failure at something I hate. From leaving the University of Toronto to become an actor, which led me into the most engaging and satisfying performance career I could’ve hoped for, from wanting to learn about directing—again, a passion that I still enjoy—to wanting to build a business (read: make my living from) working with the communications and the internet.  So here I am. Engaged in learning every day, all because I left an institution of learning to pursue something that people thought was unattainable. That’s ironic.

So believing in what we do becomes the foundation for how we successfully use this vast, evolving mass of tools and techniques that are being generated every second of every day on the internet. Of late, Social Media has become so important that it can no longer be ignored by companies that believe in what they do. It’s not a passing fancy, it’s not a diversion for people playing little games on their computer. It is a legitimate place where people expect to share information and engage in conversation with their friends, with strangers and with brands. Yes, engage in conversation with brands.

Perhaps the best example of this is Twitter. Twitter is a service that allows users to send updates or “tweets”: text-based posts, up to 140 characters long to the Twitter website quickly and easily, from the web, from Facebook, or even from your phone.

Updates are instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them (people who “follow” you) as well as to the public stream. Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application.

I joined Twitter a little over a year ago. Admittedly, at first I didn’t get it. It felt like a distraction I didn’t need. I should be writing and talking and building and working, I thought, not watching this stream of people’s tweets go by.

But gradually, I started connecting with and following people in the same business as us, and people with the same interests. I started to notice that folks were using these short posts to communicate valuable ideas, share links to important blog posts, and even just to make each other feel better in an increasingly hostile and mean-spirited world (i.e. American Idol and society’s new craving for harsh criticism of people who do things out of joy). And I wasn’t the only one.

Twitter has grown exponentially, to the point that it can barely handle it. They are currently trying to shore up the system to handle the millions of users that have flocked to it. And it’s being used creatively, engagingly, and successfully, by people and businesses alike.

But the internet shows this better than I can. In this interview of Amy Worley from H&R Block By Rodney Rumford of www.Facereviews.com, see how a massive company uses it to engage with its customers.

But here at the Moxy blog, it’s important to note why we wanted to come on board to do some design for Terry. Web presence is about findability, as Aarron Walter describes brilliantly in this month’s issue of A List Apart. And we noted that with Terry’s existing site that was basically a catalogue built on non-standards-aware code, findability was being impeded by the site. I believe really strongly that the beauty of his work with stone fireplaces is the direct result of his talents as an artist; and that folks who want that kind of high-end detail in a big investment for their home, should be able to find his story on the web.

So have a look at stone-fireplace.ca for more info about Terry, his team and their work!

We still have much to do there (like add proper contact forms and begin to showcase some actual fireplace mantel models) but that will come in time. The main thing is we’ve given findability a chance through standards and design.

The fact is, I’ve been scurrying back and forth between client work, March Breakage, and a ton of voice work. Carol left today for a mini-tour of the Southern USA with clarinet-phenom Dave Bennett.

But there’s some wonderful things in store down the road. We’re going to begin developing our first web-based app, Involvid, a new twist on video training and certification; we’re going to get Carol rolling with some Singing Instruction and Technique; and we’re lending a hand to our brilliant cousin Terry Corbett over at Northern Stoneworks, embarking on a new stone fireplace site.

So watch this space – lots more coming soon!

It was great chatting afterwards with some of the guests. It’s a little unorthodox to wax poetic about web development (and in particular, web standards), and how a lifetime of working with actors, designers and directors led me to them—but there is a connection. That connection should just be made more quickly when there’s good food waiting.

Our thanks to Shane O’Neill from Hitachi Canada for the invite. It was a great night.