nathanperetic

Our goal for the rest of the year is to cover our costs by working exclusively on United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau. If we haven't quite bridged the gap, we might take on brief, time-blocked consulting work after the holidays. This would be a big, big change from how we've operated for the past four years. All the previous work we did was flat-fee, project. We'd work with a client from strategy to launch. The consulting we were referring to in this would be a 20 or 30 hour, one week engagement and it might not result in us writing a single line of code or opening Photoshop/Illustrator.

We have a couple options for staying in business if United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau don't grow fast enough to sustain us. We'd prefer not to need to explore those options, but I hope you can understand why we need to leave that door open. We'd be very sad if we had to stop doing what we enjoy because we ran out of money, and a lot of other people would be too.

Yeah, it's kind of a press release for United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau, but that's only for people who don't know who we are. Within the web design industry, we have lots of friends who would be interested to know why we're done working with clients. We tried to write something that works for everyone. We'll be writing a lot next week on United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau to speak directly to those audiences.

Depends what you mean by real money, of course. There might not be super-startup-huge-exit money, but there's definitely make-a-small-business-you-enjoy money. And, more broadly, there's always money if you're willing to cut corners or be unethical. We're more interested in building something sustainable and something that makes people happy. T-shirts make people happy, and Cotton Bureau helps people make t-shirts which makes those people happy too.

How do you mean? We don't manufacture the shirts we use (yet), but I suppose we're open to it if the demand is there. Do you know anyone that's doing it well?

Thanks! We use exclusively American Apparel right now, but there are obvious reasons why we don't want to do that forever. We're planning to add additional (high-quality only) shirt styles and manufacturers.

Exactly. Pixelworkers was always a playground for us. Cotton Bureau was explicitly started with the intention of it becoming a business.

Mostly front-end and design. We started on Big Cartel, then switched to Shopify. Original site wasn't responsive because it was from 2010. Built the first responsive version, badly, in January 2012 then re-design and re-built it in September 2012 to make better use of the space on big screens and improve performance.

Here's a thing from when we launched on Big Cartel: http://www.fullstopinteractive.com/blog/2010/05/big-cartel-r...

Here's a thing from when we switched to Shopify: http://blog.unitedpixelworkers.com/2012/03/13/why-shopify

Here's a thing from when we tried to make amends for some of our initial responsive sins: http://blog.unitedpixelworkers.com/2012/09/19/introducing-un...

Unfortunately that's about all I've written regarding the technical changes to the site over the years. It might have been a bit clearer if I had said re-designed and re-engineered the front-end if slightly less pithy. Hope that makes more sense.