I love free stuff so thought I would contribute.
I recently was asked to design and build a small site for a coach firm based in Hampshire. The initial design I come up with was not really brand friendly so have moved on to the new one.
I must admit I liked the original design, It may not have fit with branding but it was a simple, and easy to build site so thought I would give it away.
The file is a PNG Fireworks CS3 file, so please be aware of that. So why not download it.
Frog CMS seems to be a new player in the market at the moment, and I have to say so far I am reasonably impressed. In my opnion CMS generally are so bloody complicated that you tend to look at them play for a bit and then slag them off because you could not quite get it right.
Well I have been working with Frog recently when I have a spare min (Which to be honest is not often), and have found it to be very nice to work with. It is as is says a lightweight CMS, no libary of a million plugins that could be cut to 10 because they all do the same thing. It is lightweight with a gew developers who have grown to enjoy using and programming with it.
True to most open source solutions, it is a bit buggy and certain improvments could be made but on the whole it works as a nice development platform and also allows a client to create pages really simply. The use of snippets and layouts(templates) makes the whole system feel a lot more controlled from a developer point a view, meaning the user need not worry about wrecking what you have done.
I shall keep on working on it and let you know when I have something produced it in it (See you in 2010 then).
It has really taken off this month – I have work coming out of my ears. My typing arm is a bit knackered from all the hockey I have been playing and falling over a lot and then being spanked by the strikers, consequently I have just invested 500 British pounds of my monet in a new kit, 500 pounds for four bits of foam.
Anyway – I have managed to secure Releif Milkerz, C&F Hockey, DLP Coaches, Showbiz Spy and Mantek as clients and a couple of others on the card. Releif Milkerz is the site I am currently working on and is a big project which in my opnion is going to work really well, very niche!.
C&F Hockey Club Design
Relief Milkerz Concept
Also this month I finally got iwantotworkinoz up and running – you can see it at www.iwanttoworkinoz.com.
Spending time away from my blog has been common practice for me as of late – I could use an excuse of “I’m too busy” but that is not the case, but I somewhat think it will be very soon.
This month has probably been the most exciting and rewarding for me of late as I have managed to get 4 web projects from my website, Hooray!. One is a static site with wordpress integrated, another a bespoke CMS and Showbiz Spy comes home (Another wordrpress site). I also have some consultancy on a WordPress project and helping implementation from a local to live enviroment. I can wait.
So what else is new, Well I found and finally signed up to carbonmade an online portfolio site which I will be using to showcase designs to clients, it just beats an online secure area which would just be a nightmare to build with all this work going on. I am officaly now a GAWDS member (Guild of Accessible Web Designers, you can see my ugly mug and profile at their website .
In terms of coding I actually sat down and played with Paypal’s sanbox, and got all the IPN crap working. You are probably wondering why not sooner? well to be fair I have not really needed to know it, but now I do I decided to have a play.
Nascar Skins seems to be doing well, I just dont have the time to update it and create more skins and will be releasing a new upload your skin page soon so it is self populated. Also Graphic River was unvailed and I have got to say it is a fantastic website, I love it! – Istock vectors for $20 sod off!, $5 for some awesome work good effort from the envato boys.
I plan to release some new freebies soon, so keep coming back.
You havent heard from me in a while I know a bit slack really from my good self.
I have been really hammering away at wordpress and working with it’s API. I have got to be honest I have learnt so much it is unbeliavble, the best thing was learning about all the bits and pieces that you don’t look into as I normally just use it as a news section for clients sites.
What I have noticed is the abillity to manipulate the way it works and build around the way it works and how easy it is to add the theme options and extended functions to make the site do what you want to do. I finally loooked at the Custom Fields in posts and realised how easy it is to add them to really give your posts an extra dimension instead of just having a list of posts.
Normally with CMS WP installaions what you find is it is just the Pages that end up being used and the posts are applied as News within the site. What I have found is a way of making posts power various parts of the site so you cna have many dynamic CMS pages, its all very good.
At the end of the day I would still favour bespoke builds of CMS over a WP installation any day as in my opnion WordPress is a blogging platform and that is what it should be used for, but then again it is easier to use rather than drupal or joomala in my opnion which to a client you need to have a degree in computer sciences to even comprehend how it all works.
Ok a lack of blogging of late which as been a poor performance by myself. But I have not had a lot to talk about. I am still building a couple of sites and a have a couple of projects coming up.
I have decided to move forward and actually finish a small private project as I still get of hundreds of visits to my Nascar Skins site, so it would make sense to finish it and grab some revenue from it.
Pro Avs and Plasma screen rentals are on hold at the moment while the client gathers content. I have got a couple of projects up my sleeve one of which is simple but could become completely viral (Details to follow).
Well thats a another month over – of programming, twittering and swearing lots at my PC.
Oh dear,
It happened. I accidently overwrote this site’s CSS file by accident and buggered it right up. I stupidly against my better judgement worked live for a while and never made a back up of the file.
My tip of the day: upload a second version of your CSS file and rename it to _mycss.css just so you can quickly revert it if you make a fatal error, like I did.
Gutted.
Well it is nearly here, time to absue your body with saturated fats and alcohol, then after three days spent on the loo getting rid of all the rich foods and wondering why none of your christmas jeans fit, its time for the new years resolution.
I am already planning ahead and have some great tools I am writing with a WordPress Themer being the major one. It is time with the world now getting shot of IE6 as of Febuary so we can now all start using Alpha channel PNG’s and making some funky CSS tricks. I love CSS and hate IE6 and IE7 a bit as well (damn you support CSS3 corners, even IE8 does not do it), but these are still the industry standards.
As well as this my next trick will be writing more Flash micro games just as something extra to do and another arm on my service offering. I love games and no doubt next year will looking at looking at Microsoft’s XNA game framework and honing my C# skills (Polymorphic Objects, not easy).
So come May next year I will probably be saying the same things but I have bought my nex 19″ TFT monitors, spec’d up my PC and ready to go at it hammer and tongs next year.
I already have a couple of projects ready Pro Avs is in development, Twinkle Twinkle little Bride needs a whole brand and website (Paypal shopping cart) and as well as that a cab firm wants a website. Groovy 2009 bring it on.
Expect more free illustrations and vectors as well as I am now loving doing them, The latest a race horse is pretty damn good,event though the jockey looks a bit bloaty.
Love it, Merry christmas all and have a cracking new year. See you in 2009.
Ahh Forza 2. Blogged on this ages a go and to be fair my xbox 360 time has been waining of late. I put it down to just not being interested but it has all changed lately mainly thanks to my mate Gaz, who kept on about racing online. So one wet afternoon I decided to crack it on give Gaz a call and three hours later we where loving it and talking about setting up a league so www.forza2leagues was bought up and work started on a microsite mini.forza2leagues.co.uk.
Needless to say 3 hours design and build and we have a really nice and simple site build. There is still a lot do but we love it, and so much so two others have joined the league and we will soon be promoting it to the Forza main site once the back end is sorted.
Finally it is here my new site and I got to be honest I have still got to do a a fair bit of work to it before i can deem it as finished. I will imagine by that point I would be bored silly of it and want to change it but for now it fits the purpose.
Looking forward to what next year has got to offer for me so fingers crossed.
Check back for updates.
