05/16/2007 - Blogging, sex, Jewish girls, colors and web design

People actually read this blog. I know because one of them contacted me and said, "Did you know you are supposed to write in a blog every day?" I was writing in this about quarterly. Quarterly is defined in the same way as our corporate newsletter is published quarterly (translation: quarterly = "When we damn well feel like it"). So, today I am going to cater to Willie Davis and write what happens to be on my mind, such as it is.

A few years ago, when my third daughter was fifteen years old, someone told us a joke that went something like this:

"What's the difference between a Catholic girl and a Jewish girl? A Catholic girl says, 'Oh, Jesus! Oh Christ!' and a Jewish girl says, 'Beige... next time I'm going to paint the ceiling beige.'"

In the car on the way home my daughter turned to me and said wonderingly,

"Jewish people like beige?"

I thought of this today because lately we have been somewhat obsessed with colors. The number of people coming to our website each day is increasing dramatically. We are frantically trying to keep updating and adding to the content, which is our real purpose, the real purpose, I think, of every website, and at the same time keep up with technological changes and start looking more professional as far as graphic design and all the other aspects of a website that make people unconsciously think, "This doesn't suck."

There is a problem just in general that I am an ultimate perfectionist, triple-A personality control freak, as anyone who knows me can tell you, while graphic designers have never met a deadline they couldn't ignore. They also seem to not only know the difference between rouge and vermillion but they actually care! One of my definining moments in life occurred in high school where I flunked art, had no problems in Calculus and loved Matrix Algebra (an indicator of my eventual specialization in statistics where I was the only one in my class, as my friend said, who thought there was anything normal at all about the normal equation).

One of the points people have made about our website is that it should be consistent. That is, we should not have frames on one page, templates on another and just plain text on a third. They are right and we are correcting that but it takes a while. The other thing someone pointed out is that the colors should match. We should not have an aqua (apparently that is a color) background on our home page and brown background on the commons area and virtual library and pink on the early childhood section, etc. So, I thought - beige - or brown, what's the difference? We're an Indian-owned company and I am Latina and we're all brown so why not?