I am now back in the country and available to help you with your website or Macintosh support needs. Please fill out the Support Request form to reach me. I will respond promptly.

I am committed to providing support to all of my clients. I will be out of the country for the remainder of 2007 without reliable internet access. During this time, if you have an urgent need for Macintosh support or website updates, please fill out the Support Request form. If I am unable to respond immediately, your request will be forwarded to one of my subcontractors who will assist you.

Prairie Nutcracker©, a uniquely Kansas adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s traditional Nutcracker has been a holiday tradition in Hutchinson, Kansas since 2000, but it has been under the umbrella of ArtisTree. This year, Prairie Nutcracker Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit organization was founded and is looking to put Prairie Nutcracker© on the map as a Kansas tourist event. Prairienutcracker.com was launched on August 7.

For the forseeable future, AA Cybersolutions will no longer be operating from a home base of Hutchinson Kansas. While continuing to provide Macintosh software support, Macintosh and Windows application training, web design and development, web site consulting services, and more, these services will mostly be provided over the phone or Internet and not in person. As many of the services I have been providing do not necessarily require in person support, I am still committed to providing the same high level of service my clients have come to expect of AA CyberSolutions.

For the remainder of the year I will be traveling and working abroad, and I will not have daily access to the Internet, so I may not respond immediately to all cases. I do have a few sub-contractors who are willing to handle emergency cases during this time, and someone will answer you depending on the nature of your need. You will soon be able to submit your case online by visiting http://aacybersolutions.com. You may also call 620-860-4284 or 866-802-2865 (toll free) at any time to hear more information on how to get support, or leave a message which will reach me wherever I am.

I am available for house calls in Hutchinson August 6-11, so if you have a need for in person support, please email me at amy[at]aacybersolutions[dot]com, or call 620-860-4284 to set up an appointment.

Last year I had my Buhler High School 10-year reunion, and of course I was asked to build the website for our class. As always, time was short, but I got a head start thanks to Irene Soderstrom. She built the website for her class - BHS 1995, so I copied the design of their site. I did spend quite a bit of time rebuilding the back end of the site and cleaning up the code to make it easier to update. Turns out, the time I spent doing that paid off because this year I got an email from the BHS class of 1997 asking me to convert our reunion website for their class. With relatively few changes I had bhs1997.net up and running.

Today I launched a website for Jennifer Randall to showcase her paintings.

Jennifer is a good friend who has her studio in downtown Hutchinson, KS in the old Crystal Ballroom that she and her husband Dan Brizendine are restoring. Dan & Jennifer plan to convert the upstairs into a loft where they will live with their three kids.

Please visit jenniferrandall.net and spend some time with Jennifer’s work.

This post is a bit out-of-date, but since I’m writing about sites I’ve developed, I must mention artistree.org. This was actually the website that inspired my career as a web developer. ArtisTree is my mom’s business, so I have been responsible for every site redesign. The latest iteration is the 3rd or 4th major redesign. It all began in the mid-1990s when I scanned in a watercolor tree, made an image map, and created some stub pages for the various branches of ArtisTree. I later added a few other graphics and had some very gawdy background images. The site was first developed into an informative and usable site in 2000 when Olivia Kobelt and I developed the site for our college Sr. Capstone project at Principia College. This was the first significant website I’d worked on, and for a couple of newbies it was actually pretty good.

After college I became a professional Web Developer for The Christian Science Monitor, and discovered many new web tools and technologies and I longed for the day I’d have the time to redo artistree.org. This past summer I finally had that opportunity and gave the site a much cleaner and up-to-date look. Of course, there’s still a lot more I’m hoping to do with it, but that’s the nature of the web. Any good site will ALWAYS be “under construction.”

These days it’s much easier than it was 5-10 years ago for the average computer user to create their own website. This blog is proof of that. I only had a few buttons to click, and bingo, I had installed blog software that does everything for me (and more) that I’ve always taken it upon myself to code.

As a web developer, I like to have total control. I’m a proponent of clean code that adheres to the W3C standards. I abhor WYSIWIG editors that code the HTML for you. Worst of all are those Microsoft Word documents exported to HTML.

Art Sundquist, of Sundquist Photography in Hutchinson, KS, has such a site which he created himself from a template. Art has a great philosophy on studio and event photography. He is all about the experience and puts his clients first. Instead of diluting his attention from his clients and figuring out how to update his site himself, he asked me to make some updates to the website that he put up several years ago.

There is much more I want to do with this site to make it really start working for him, but I have done some basic optimization to a few of the main pages:

• Home page
• Welcome page
• Wedding Photography

I also created a new Baby photography page based on the site template.

I have visions of the hypercolor t-shirt I finally got in 8th grade. Remember those shirts that changed colors when they got warm? Most of my friends got their hypercolor t-shirts in 6th or 7th grade, I got my purple t-shirt that turned pink around the armpits just as they were going out of style.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I’m FINALLY joining the blogging bandwagon. Unlike my hypercolor t-shirt, I don’t think blogging is going out of style anytime soon.

I’ve kept a journal during my around the world adventures, and it always took me twice as long to write about the highlights of each day as to live them. This blog won’t be another one of those online journals that no one actually has the time to read. I really just needed a way to help drive traffic to my clients’ sites and get them indexed by search engines.