Traditionally, organizing an email inbox has been a chore. If all emails from clients come to your address, then it’s a sorting game into folders. Simple email filters can make this a lot easier, but there’s always the question of your filter criteria. Usually, filtering by source address or domain can help, but this can lead to problems with clients with multiple points of contact or multiple email addresses.

I’ve found a simple solution to this using Gmail. I use Gmail for Domains for my email system, and this includes a nice feature. When giving contact information to clients, I append an identifier onto the end of the email address, like this: erik+client-name@eriktdesign.com.  This way, I can set up one filter for each client to sort by “To:” address into a single label for each client. Aside from saving hassle, this has several other benefits. First, you can see where referrals come from. Assuming your client gives someone else your contact information, you can clearly see that this new prospect has come in through a particular client. Also, you can tell if your email address has been sold down the river, and easily filter out the ensuing spam.

Jen at Pop Stalin also gave some good advice on organizing projects.

Good morning, friends.

I’ve taken the plunge and signed up with Dreamhost for my website hosting. I did a fair amount of research, but by no means exhaustive. I had decided to use Wordpress as a CMS for the site/blog after successfully using it for a church website backend, so the first place I started to look for hosting was at Wordpress.org. Dreamhost tops the list there, presumably because of the special pricing they have for Wordpress users (seriously, if I ever use a terabyte of disk storage… [well, never say never]).

Another host I considered was HostICan. The plan they offer is similar enough for me, and came recommended by Pop Stalin Design. However, after some looking around, I found some negative feedback with regards to their CPU limits.

So anyway, Dreamhost it is. The one-click installs they offer are pretty nice, though it isn’t that hard to set up Wordpress on your own (did that on my local machine first for a test-drive). Also, it was simple enough to set up Project Pier for my project management needs. More on that later.

So setup was a breeze. DNS seems to have propagated, so we’re live from nine to five (figuratively speaking). Stay tuned for more nerdy bits, as well as an actual design (by me!) for this site.

Cheers!