Raised Eyebrow Blog

It’s been a busy year at the Raised Eyebrow HQ. To date we have worked on more than 30 different website projects and we’ve got a few more in the works. For some projects we designed, built and launched an entire website and for others we worked on the design and handed development over to someone else. Overall the projects were as varied as our clients.

We dabbled a little in the political arena and built the JustShutUpBC website. We also worked on the nomination site for Gregor Robertson (which has since been taken offline) and we built websites for Geoff Meggs and Heather Deal. Gregor, Geoff and Heather all won in the recent civic election which can only mean that having a site done by Raised Eyebrow is sort of like a good luck charm when it comes to election time ;-)

Ofcourse the big political website we worked on in ‘08 was for the BC NDP.

We also had a chance to work with a collection of musical clients. The Vancouver Recital Society got an updated look for their new season. The Vancouver Welsh Men’s Choir got a whole new site that allows site visitors to listen to their music, buy tickets to their shows and purchase their CDs online. The Chan Centre’s website was moved into Drupal and they were also given a new look for their new season.

This year we had a contingent of clients on the Educational side of things:

• The Federation of Post Secondary Educators got an updated look and we also helped reorganize their site when it was moved into Drupal.
• The BC Teachers of English Language Arts got a snazzy new site which has a really great Resource section and a dynamic Conference area.
• Economics for Everyone is primarily a book but we got to build the book’s online companion which houses further resources for educators, unionists, activists and anyone else interested in modern day capitalism.

As well we got to work on a few sites for people who do really great work to try to make this world a bit better for everyone:

• Covenant House Vancouver: an incredible organization dedicated to helping homeless youth.
• ThinkCity: they help to empower citizens to realize their dreams of having the city they want to live in.
• Citizens for Public Power: an advocacy organization working to keep the province’s power generation system in public hands.
• The Columbia Institute: they work to foster individual and organizational leadership to help nurture sustainable communities.
• Shareholder Association for Research and Education: a social enterprise that works to coordinate and implement responsible investment practices.

It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with such great clients who are doing such awesome work themselves.

We also got to launch a pet project that was waiting in the wings for some time: the RE Blog.

It’s been a fantastic - and productive - year at Raised Eyebrow. Happy Holidays everyone! All the very best to you in ‘09.

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that as of yesterday afternoon the BC NDP has a brand new website (though depending on DNS propagation you may still see the old one, the new one should look like the image on the right here). It’s been many months of hard work, which one can say about nearly any project really, but few projects involve project contacts who are unable to take even a day off for more than 2 months (due to non-stop election fever around these parts lately), those guys and gals are superheros.

The website you see now is really a foundation for things to come. We’ve moved the BC NDP into Drupal and will be working with them in an ongoing relationship over the coming months to implement new features and functionality to build out a website that can better support the excellent work their team does in our province. As cool new features roll out, we’ll be sure to announce them here and there may even be some Drupal case study type content to contribute once we’ve all had a chance to catch our breath.

I’m particularly proud of our staff on the work they’ve done on this project and want to thank Melanie, Colin and Chris (who came into the project near the end) for all the hard work, talent and wicked brains they’ve put into the site. You’re all superstars.

As most of our friends and clients already know, Lauren and I published a book, The Boss of You, in the Spring of this year. The Boss of You is a guide for female entrepreneurs looking to start, grow and maintain a small business and it was truly a project of passion and love for Lauren and I. You see in addition to having a passion for the web and in particular how non-profits, activists and progressive business folks can use the web to make the world a better place, Lauren and I also have a long held passion for helping and collaborating with our fellow female entrepreneurs.

This week an article featuring us, and some other local female entrepreneurs came out in BC Business Magazine. Entitled What Women Want and written by Dorothy Bartoszewski, the piece touches on many topics that we covered in our book such as:

• The rate of growth of women in the business sector. Currently, in Canada, women are starting four out of every five new businesses.
• The different ways that women tend to measure success in their careers and business lives. Quoting from the article “a 2005 study that found that small-business owners look beyond mere profit or growth figures when assessing their business success. Other criteria they value include business excellence (such as positive customer relations), professional achievement (such as having control over their career) and personal satisfaction (such as balancing work/life demands and “giving back”). Women cared about these “other” criteria more than men did.”
• How we define sustainability as small business owners. Again quoting from the article “For these women, sustainability means paying themselves and their staff well; anything else, they say, isn’t sustainable over the long term. Bacon and Mears also choose to work with people they really enjoy; Raised Eyebrow’s clients are mostly non-profits and progressive businesses. Sustainability for Bacon and Mears also includes, in theory, avoiding the 24-7 workweeks typical of entrepreneurs – something the two women admit they didn’t always manage to achieve as they built their firm.”

In addition to all the positives the article also notes that the average female entrepreneur earns $30,000/year to the male $50,000. While some suggest this might have to do with women working less hours in order to be more flexible with their family lives (I’m really not sure who those women are, the ones I know who juggle work and family seem to work as much or more than their male counterparts), this trend disturbs me. We need to make sure that as women we are starting and running businesses that pay us competitive wages and salaries. While that’s more easily said than done, and while we are strong advocates for measuring success outside of an exclusively financial paradigm, I can’t stress enough the value of paying ourselves well.

The full article is well worth a read and includes the stories of some other local female entrepreneurs as well.

Re-reading the title for this post, the theme song for Welcome Back, Kotter pops unbidden into my head. In some ways maybe it’s an appropriate reference, because we have brought back to the fold a smart, beloved, and drily witty colleague, Chris Torgalson, after a year-long stint at grad school in Belgium. (That being said, the parallels pretty much end there… certainly none of us are about to ‘fess up to being Sweathogs.)

Chris was our first-ever hire at Raised Eyebrow, taking over the coding reins from me, and during his time here he helped put us on the map for open-source CMS development. He has experience with several open-source CMS options including Drupal (our CMS of choice for most projects) and Typo3, a lesser-known but highly robust CMS used by several of our clients.

We are incredibly excited to have Chris back at Raised Eyebrow; he and Colin are already working on streamlining some of our Drupal development processes, and it is evident that two intelligent, focused, technical problem-solving heads are indeed better (or at least faster) than one. I look forward to seeing what these two can accomplish together in the coming months!