Marketing my New Career

I've been a graphic designer for 20 years, and have had a very successful career. However, I've also discovered a new passion in the last 5 years....Horticulture. My perfect career is to take my skills and creativity as a designer and combine them with my new found skills in horticulture. At the end of this year, I'll have my AA degree in horticulture and my long-term goal is to eventually have my own small business as a grower of niche plants, and to promote myself and my business through the web. So obviously I need and want to learn how to build a very functional, yet also attractive web site. This class will also greatly benefit my current career as a graphic designer by adding new and necessary skills that will make me more valuable to my current employer and to ensure I remain marketable in the field. I see myself always using my graphic design skills in one form or another. I'm excited to learn more coding and how to create style sheets (I've dabbled enough to be dangerous). My main goal I'd like to walk away with from this class with is to have a clear understanding of how all the components we talk about work together, and to of course be able to build my own web site. As far as inspirational sites that I feel are designed well, apple.com is very nice. It's clean and has great imagery. cnn.com is another site that I like. They recently did a redesign earlier this year and I go there for all my news information. It does a great job at presenting a ton of information in a way that you can find what you want easily; and it downloads fast. This is really important from my perspective; users won't waste a lot of time waiting for your site to load. Larsen.com is a great site for design. I get a lot of mailings from them and I admire there work. They're very experienced on identity and branding and also have a very clean style. They also share commentary about their work for particular clients. I'm really looking forward to what I will learn this semester.