Masuga Design, LLC

Happy 1 year anniversary to…myself. Masuga Design was officially launched on April 1, 2006 so it’s been a year and a week now and I’m still here. I have some good news – I got an office in downtown Grand Rapids, and the pictureset as it progresses is on flickr. I felt I needed a place because work has taken over my life – and it was time to put a little separation between things. Now I go to work sort of like I did in the past -which means GO to work, as in elsewhere. Out in the world. …More »

I’ve received quite a few emails from people in response to my search for part-time help. I haven’t really decided on anyone yet – or even answered most of the emails as I’ve been real busy working some things out lately that have to do with the growth of Masuga Design (and the details of which will be written about here, I can assure you). All the emails are flagged and marked as “to respond”, and I’ve (seriously) been trying to find the time to respond to some of them. Some, I say, because I need to clarify what I’m …More »

I finally got around to updating that kooky AJAX Star Rating script to verion 1.2.0. Head over there right now what the fuss is about and see why that page gets Dugg, miniajax‘ed, tutorialblogged, and everything else. The star rater page has the details of the update.

I’m a plumber with leaky faucets. I’m not eating my own dogfood. You might have noticed that both this site and masuga.com are buit on WordPress, even though I’ve more or less abandoned using it. In the coming months, I’ll be rebuilding masugadesign.com on a new CMS, as well as updating my portfolio. What? You thought I haven’t been working all these months? Not the case! I’ll have a number of things to add to my portfolio when I get around to fixing the issues I’m having under the hood.

Thanks to everyone for all their patience with me from November 2006 until now. I’ve never been this bombarded with things to get done – I’ve been at my wit’s end for weeks and I’m trying to work as quickly (with no loss of quality, of course…) as I can. I’m trying to accommodate everyone and admittedly, failing miserably in some instances. I have a ridiculous number of projects to ideally get done this month – and I’m sick as a dog. Weak. Feverish. Run down. Shivery. Makes getting up and working a lot of “not fun”. But I press …More »

Masuga Design is growing…um…FAST. Too fast. I need help (part-time, that is) and I need it yesterday. Are you a student looking for some real-world experience? Then please read my spiel: I’m a (really small) web design studio that develops useful and engaging websites for small to mid-sized businesses and individuals from one coast to another including various businesses right here in Grand Rapids. I design and develop websites that are lean, easily maintainable, user friendly, search-engine optimized, and adhere as close as possible to web standards. I am currently a one-person operation located in Grand Rapids, MI and have …More »

I’m not currently taking any new work. You can still drop me an email to discuss a project, but I’m pretty well booked through March/April and simply cannot take on any new projects outside of projects I have going on or for which I have provided a proposal. Thank you!

I recently completed work on a website overhaul for Interior Concepts, a custom office furniture manufacturer located in West Michigan. The look was redone, the navigation was retooled, and the site was made much more search engine friendly. What’s more, due to the very robust content management system, they now have the ability to update almost every bit of content on the site in-house. You can see more on this project on the portfolio page, or you can see the real deal for yourself at www.interiorconcepts.com.

For some reason, the star rating script made it to some sort of del.icio.us “hotlist” today, and that absolutely wreaked havoc with this site. It has been off and on all day, and I’m pretty sure my email is completely borked. I haven’t received an email since 9am today, so I apologize if you emailed me today and I wasn’t able to get back to you. I am considering moving masugadesign.com off of its current server within the next couple months, because the problems with downtime and email issues have grown a bit much for me to be able to …More »

I just added a new section to the site called "The Lab" where my feeble attemps at PHP scripting and Wordpress plugins will be found. Right now the main (read: only) thing there is an updated Star Rating script. It's much improved over the original. You'll love it. Here are some of the new features in v1.1: Uses unobtrusive Javascript, so ratings will still work if the user has Javascript off (the script has been tested in IE 6, Safari, and FF). keeps Javascript out of the HTML, resulting in cleaner markup There are now some checks in place to discourage …More »