If you haven’t read the previous post, Gail Dela Cruz was one of the recent winners in the Wordpress Theme Competition by ArenaWP. Gail is a self-taugh web designer, a dog lover and will be getting married soon! (Not to dogs of course) Read on for more details…
P_WP: Hello Gail, thanks for giving us the time to spare for this interview. You have been in the Philippine blog circles and have heard you during the first iBlog summit. You were a finalist at last years Philippine Web Awards, so how did your web life all start? Can you give us a brief history? (Pwede din long history if you want. hehe)
Gail: Hmm… It’s kind of a long story… About 10 years worth of stories, in fact. 
My parents are both artists, my dad a photojournalist for the Inquirer, and my mom a painter (just a hobbyist). Even my sister was great with a pencil and a sketchpad. But me, I could only draw cartoons, nothing fancy. When we first got internet back in 1996 (I was in my second year in high school), that’s when I fell in love with web/graphics design. I went through the mIRC stage, but got bored with it eventually when I decided one day that I wanted to build my own site and make graphics like those I visit. So I got me a Photoshop 4 installer (a birthday present from my dad), and played around with it. When I knew how to create my own graphics, that’s when I started viewing HTML source codes (I learned the hard way: deconstruction). There weren’t much tutorials about HTML back then, so I didn’t have much choice.
So then I made sites for my high school class, myself, my dad, and other relatives and friends. In college, I stopped web for a while when I got into Ateneo’s school paper and became the Graphic Design Editor for two years. I did some freelance print stints for some time (you know, digital album layouts for my dad’s photographer friends), and even worked for a call center as tech support after college. I haven’t even reached regularization (I was only there for about 6 months) until I got bored answering the same computer questions every single day. That’s when I went back to web.
Took me about a month to get myself familiarized with the trends again, then I launched Kutitots. After a couple of months of very little web design gigs (I had to rely on my dad’s contacts for some time), I got lucky and had a client who sent a regular flow of work to me. I think my first big break on the blogging community was getting the Blog Site of the Year Award for the 2004 Philippine Blog Awards (which is now defunct, unfortunately). So there. Told you it was long
P_WP: Nice history, I can totally relate to that, starting out from nothing with no ‘real’ formal training. Are you an artist with technical skills? Or technical person with artistic skills? Obviously, you do know your flash very well, how are you with the backend stuff, like PHP/MySQL?
Gail: Definitely an artist with technical skills. I can’t program an app or create a custom module even if my life depended on it.
I’m really not a coder… so let’s just say I know enough to skin it, change it a bit, and manipulate it enough to create themes of my liking But start from scratch and create custom modules? Nope. Not in this lifetime.
P_WP: What actually is Kutitots? Reminds me of Kalikot and Kiti-kiti.
Gail: Well, I’ve searched the net and it actually means some kind of a pepper in a Visayan dialect. But the way I came up with the name was less exciting than that… And I can’t explain any other way without sounding girly.
My family and I (and now includes my fiance) like inventing words out of real ones. Kind of like “baby talk” or something affectionate. “Kutitots” is our plural for “Kutitot,” which happens to be my family’s cutesy term for kuto. Yes. flea. As in, fleas in a dog that suck blood and become as big as a raisin when fed well. Anyway, I picked Kutitots for my site’s name for the simple reason that I love dogs, and they have fleas. It’s ok for one dog in the house to have a little bit of fleas. But if you’re talking about more than 10 (13, to be exact), peeing, scratching, and running all over the house, it’s an entirely different story altogether.
I think you’ll now understand why I still cringe a bit when somebody calls me “Kutitots” instead of “Gail.” 
P_WP: I will take note of that and make sure I always call you Gail. Now for the Wordpress stuff, I have seen your flash site before and now it is a Wordpress blog. Why and when did you decide to change? Is the flash site still up there somewhere in some archived page on the net by the way?
Gail: Updating drove me nuts It was just too difficult to maintain… And frankly, I got a bit bored with it because Marc is better than in animation hehe. The old version is actually still on the Net: http://gaildelacruz.com/kutitots/v6yinyang/
Seriously though… I just thought that it might be better to just concentrate on my strengths (I can’t take away the fact that static sites was my starting point in 1996) and just leave animation to Marc, where he’s obviously better than me. Besides, ever since we did this specialization thing between us, our production time became faster.
P_WP: Before working on Wordpress, have you tried any other similar CMS package? Like Textpattern, Mambo/Joomla?
Gail: I’ve used Mambo once for a client. But for my personal use? No. I used Movable Type for about a year ago for Kutitots though… Until it crashed on me and I had no way of changing blog platforms except for republishing about 150 entries 
That screw up happened when there was a CPanel upgrade and apparently, MT wasn’t compatible with it. I didn’t want to mess with my CPanel, so I just abandoned MT altogether and switched to WordPress… One of the best decisions I’ve ever made, I must say.
P_WP: OMG! 150 entries, I am not going to do that. As for designing, what other websites you admire? Websites you look up too and draw inspiration from?
Gail: I really like Jeff Croft and Phu Ly’s works. I also love the way Bryan Veloso uses blue in Avalonstar (Blue is my favorite color). But Joshuaink’s flowery site is my favorite. If I want to see design trends, I go to Design Shack, CSS Beauty, and CSSimport. I actually go for designs that aren’t too minimalist (heck, I LOVE graphics). I started in 1996 as a graphic designer-hobbyist, so I really can’t not add graphics
P_WP: How long do you work in front of the computer on a daily average? And what do you do when you are not in front of the computer?
Gail: I can’t answer this question without sounding so geeky… I sleep at an average of 6 hours a day, eat a full meal (”brunch” most of the time) for about an hour, take a bath and do girly things for another hour… so that’s 24 minus 8… 16 hours!
That’s been my daily sched for about two years now (sometimes even during weekends). It was only recently that I cut down the days of “computer babad” to every other day and strictly implemented a “no-work-on-weekends” sched. Every other day, I’ll spend 16 hours in front of the computer… The rest of the days, only about 6 or 8. This gives me more than enough time to rest, prevent burnout, and have time to manage this novelty invitations and souvenirs business I started with my sister and cousins: Filipino Artisans (hehe plugging!).
P_WP: Girly and geeky, sounds cool to me. I know you love your dogs, and based on your blog, you are preparing to get married. Has your fiancée ever get jealous with your love for your dogs?
Gail: Oh yes. We fight over them ALL the time Actually, we argue over one specific dog: Choknat. He’s one of my three favorite dogs, and both he and Marc are at each other’s throats every time they see one another. Marc scared Choknat during the dog’s “formative” years, and I guess he took it to heart and never forgave him LOL. But other than that… Marc pretty much gets along well with my dogs, especially Sheero, our number one girl.
P_WP: What is the name of you favorite dog and why he/she is your favorite?
Gail: It’s Sheero. Marc and I love her so much that we incorporated our media company under her name
Sheero is actually Marc’s present to me. He gave her to us at a timely moment: my 12-year-old cat had just passed away when she came. She was actually the first ever “replacement” for my long-time pet, that’s why she became the closest to me. My other two favorites, Harry and Choknat, are her sons so the two just came later on. But Sheero was the first.
P_WP: Is Marc, your husband-to-be also in the same field of study as you? Like you do tech talk conversations on dates?
Gail: Haha. Worse than that. We sometimes spend our dates in front of the computer. I’m not kidding. The worse was probably spending my 24th birthday “dinner” in front of the PC and rushing a print ad design
Marc and I both love art and computers… But he’s more into video editing and animation that web/graphics design. I don’t have much patience for frame-by-frame stuff, he does. Most of the sites with animation on my portfolio were done by Marc (except for the old Flash version of Kutitots and my old portfolio). I design everything in Photoshop, chop it up, code it then turn over to him the PSDs that need animating in Flash.
It’s kind of geeky, but at least no one can say we’re not spending enough time together. Hehe.
P_WP: We are straying away from the Wordpress topics, lets go back. Any Wordpress plugin you cannot live without?
Gail: For my own use (personal or business), I really like Keyvan Minoukadeh’s Paged Comments plugin and Ryan Duff’s Contact Form plugin. The Paged Comments plugin makes pages with a lot of comments look organized. I frankly don’t like skimming through pages that are too long (That’s one of the main reasons why I put The_Excerpt tag on my themes’ home page loop instead of The_Content). The Contact Form… I can’t say that I CAN’T live without it, but it’s mighty useful when I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to make my own contact form for a site I’m doing that’s running on WordPress.
These aren’t much, I know. To be honest, I try as much as possible not to use plugins unless absolutely necessary. For my sites, I’m willing to put plugins if it’s cool. But for my clients’… Well, I’m a bit skeptical about it due to the possible issues that can arise. Most of the existing plugins have coding that are totally foreign to me. And if it’s on my clients’ site, I will have a problem supporting it. At least if it’s on my own site, I can just take it out when it’s not working.
P_WP: In the world of SEO, Wordpress Templates are great Google PageRank machines with all that inbound links from the template footer. Derek’s template has given him a PR5 which can be done with quality inbound linking and other good SEO practices. Passing the PR5 mark is usually a challenge of getting a bunch of high PR sites linked to you and getting a large volume as well. Your FilipinoWebDesigner.com page is already PR6. Is this something you are happy about or you are not really into SEO stuff right now?
Gail: Oh yes. I’m more than happy about it… But very surprised. I haven’t really checked my PageRank until you said my site is already at PR6!
The idea of the FilipinoWebDesigner.Com was for me to have a web design blog (frankly, I sometimes can’t blog about serious things on Kutitots such as web design due to the different type of audience). I’m really glad that it’s become more than that.
Aside from the use of Filipino words as theme titles, I try as much as possible to give a little “Pinoy” lesson on the ReadMe.TXT files of my themes. I don’t know… I guess I just wanted Pinoys to be recognized somehow (even in little ways) in the international WordPress community. There’s just something about learning that a certain work is done by a Pinoy. You get a feeling of affinity, makes you feel proud. I guess one of the reasons that got me into this whole Filipino-titled theme thing was when I first found out from Abe that Kates Gasis was Pinoy. I was using the KGArchives on my holiday Kutitots theme, and never knew it was done by a “kababayan.” Knowing that a really popular plugin was made by a Filipino makes you just want to say, “ASTIG,” and feel that you’re part of it somehow.
P_WP: Yeah, we are all proud to be Pinoy! There was a time in the late 90’s I owned both kalayaan.com and kalayaan.net and domains were still $35. I was in the Philippines, and was not earning much. So gave them away, sayang. Wait, we are talking about you, not me. LOL. The Isla Theme is now out, I like the scalability of the left column, how it adjust with the width, full CSS sites passing W3C validation. Do you always strive to make your sites W3C compliant?
Gail: Tricky question. I remember being asked a similar question at the first iBlog Summit. But my answer will remain the same: It depends on the client, the work, and the team involved. If it’s for a client who doesn’t care much how a site is coded as long as it looks exactly like the design draft I presented, I would go full CSS and W3C validated. But sometimes, I still get clients who specifically request to use tables instead. There are really just some people who don’t feel comfortable with it (their personal preferrence, I guess). But since it’s their site and they’re paying for it, what the heck
There are also instances when I’m working on a collaborative project with a “hard” coder (you know… geniuses when it comes to coding, but are scared shit when faced with a Photoshop task), like an OScommerce site for example. Most coders I’ve worked with aren’t comfortable with using DIV tags, and in these instances, it’s more productive to just forget about W3C validation and full CSS.
Like Derek, I get a happy feeling when I see the green “Passed Validation!” notice. When I know at the start of a project that the site will not validate, I don’t check it anymore so I won’t feel bad about seeing a red notice
P_WP: I think those programmers just do not know what they are doing and are old-school-tables-people. Lastly… are we expecting more of Gail in PinoyWordpress.com? Sharing a tip or two to the Pinoy Wordpress community?
Gail: Of course. I actually try to inject a bit of tutorials whenever I answer support questions for my themes. Abe (Yugatech), Luis (Gibbity), and I were actually planning something like this, but are just too busy to do anything about it. So yes, you’ll definitely see more of me here
P_WP: Yes, I understand. Making blogs just uses so much time. Even PinoyWordpress.com is taking some slow development since everyone is busy. So we are stuck with Kubrick right now, LOL. Any last words for the PinoyWordpress Community?
Gail: Thanks for featuring me here. It’s a great honor
I really look forward to taking part in this community, and help as much as I can for the love of WordPress Kudos to Benj for putting this all together.
Gail Dela Cruz won the Best Use of Colors and 2nd Place Overall Winner in the Wordpress Theme Competition by ArenaWP. More about Gail and her work can be found on his website Kutitots. More information can also be found on her profile on the PhilWeavers’ website.
Interviewed by Benj Arriola of ActionOnline.
Benj’s PhilWeavers Profile
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