Simplifying Life and Business for Improved Mental Health

Manic Melon is the weblog of Kevin Barber: father, cyclist, entrepreneur, and president of a Internet consultancy based in Overland Park, KS. More

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Freeride Midwest

FreerideMidwest.com allowed 'manic melon approach' to turn into a simple yet very sufficient website... and on a minimal budget!
Freeride MidwestFreeride Midwest is a great niche bike shop owned in part by my friend Troy Wohlberg. Troy's a cool guy and needed a cool website to get him some local visibility.

Rapid Design + Wordpress Integration

I met with Troy on a Friday, and had a mockup to him by the end of the day. We made some enhancements to the concept, and had it coded the following business day. We took an additional three days working it into a custom wordpress as a cms theme and bam... the most rapidly designed site we've ever done!
Freeride Midwest

Content Building in Progress, but check it out

Troy is a pretty busy guy, so there is not yet much content at Freeride Midwest's new site. But check out Freeride Midwest for a fresh yet simple design combined with the use of wordpress as a cms.

Searching for Kevin Barber

When looking for Kevin Barber in search engines, you won't find ManicMelon.com... at least not yet. Learn about my search for Kevin Barber and how I make myself easy to find. Use this as an example for how to make your site easily found under your most related phrases.

I've always said that the sites with the most content about a given topic ultimately win the ranking. Sure there's more to it than that when optimizing your web site, but the content is the most important thing. Recently I searched for Kevin Barber and realized Manic Melon is not found. I can't think of a better opportunity to prove my point than showing you how I can become highly ranked with Kevin Barber.

The Lone Star Century

The Lone Star Century is an annual 100 mile event sponsored by the Johnson County Bike Club, of which I'm now a member.

The Route

The Lone Star Century started at Oregon Trail Park in Olathe, KS and crossed Lawrence's Clinton Lake before arriving at Lone Star Lake. The Lone Star Century was an "out and back" route with distance options of 25, 45, 72 and 100 miles. I personally was looking forward to the 72 mile route, but at the turn around point I opted for the century. The route was very well marked, and the SAG support was great.
Lone Star Century Map

Designers - Logo Feedback Please

I'd like to do an experiment. The experiment is to allow other designers, visiting my site from sources like CSS Drive, CSS Remix, and CSS Tux to weigh in on a logo concept.

While I do not offer logo design as a service, we were asked by one of our existing customers to provide rapid fire logo iterations for a possible branding update.

MS150 Training Ride: Shawnee Mission

Here's some stats for the shawnee mission training ride for the Kansas City MS150.

Dear MS150 riders,
Ever want to know just how tough the Shawnee Mission training ride (DOD=5) hills are?
Here are some new stats I collected today

Hill Size

Loop II of the ride consists of 1300 feet of climbing. There is a single hill that is 214 feet by itself, which is the climb you may have heard about. It's followed quickly by a 120 foot climb that's not too bad if you keep your momentum from the awesome decent leading into it.
Elevation chart for the Shawnee Mission training ride