I’ve added a new project to my portfolio, a website for a startup Financial/Tax advising company in the Milwaukee area. The site was designed and developed for Wordpress using my new design and markup framework. The project gave me an opportunity to spend some more time in Illustrator, explore some new Wordpress plugins, and work out the kinks in my framework (more on this to come).
Please take some time to visit Safe CPA.com.
First of all, what is the plural form of CMS? Anyone? Anyone?
As part of the never-ending learning process I have decided to dedicate the next few weeks to a lot of projects I should have started years ago. To begin, I finally installed a working WAMP environment on my machine so that I can test server -side code, including CMS installations, locally. This should save me hours upon hours in development time in the future.
I also finally finished developing my own front-end web framework. It’s a hybrid of the 960 Grid System, my own default style preferences which I use in the vast majority of my projects, and 6 jQuery plugins which I always reuse. I realized after a while that I just kept running into and spending hours solving the same problems with each project I started, so I instead decided to work out all of the nitty-gritty details and create one clean web page with all the bells and whistles that works in all the major browsers. Now I should be able to just copy that source folder and apply project-specific colors and images and be done with most of the markup.
I’m also finally taking the time to learn all that there is in Photoshop and to learn Illustrator. I’ve never done vector illustrations before but as I’m doing more and more design work it’s becoming a dire necessity. I’ve only been at it a week and it’s been a bit more difficult than I would have hoped, but within a few weeks I should have the basics conquered.
Getting more familiar with the various CMS systems available is also a major item on my to-do list over the next few weeks. I’ve been using CMS Made Simple and Wordpress, and I’ve decided that I just plain don’t like Joomla. I think I’ll take a look at the latest offerings from Wordpress and CMS Made Simple as well as checking out Cushy CMS and maybe Drupal. Does anybody have any CMS recommendations?
It’s January again. Outside it’s cold and gray, I don’t have a dime left after the holidays, I’m 20 pounds heavier than I was last summer, and there’s not much to look forward to until spring. What does this mean for me? It means it’s time for the annual “Do nothing but exercise and learn from free tutorials” time of the year!!! Last year around this time I taught myself jQuery, experimented with CMS and blog platforms, began object oriented Java and PHP, and improved my knowledge of databases. Considering that I’m now working primarily as a designer rather than a developer, I think I’ll be concentrating on Flash and Photoshop. I recently starting learning how to actually use the Pen tool and other things like custom textures and I now realize I never knew more than a fourth of what one can do with Photoshop. Hopefully I can truly call myself a Photoshop expert by the time spring rolls around!
My two-month long redesign project is finally done!!! I spent a lot of time deciding what went into and what would come out of this revamped portfolio/blog and I couldn’t be happier. I decided to take out things like detailed “About Me” sections and the “FAQ” page since nobody seemed to ever read them anyway. The “Services” page also went away for the same reason. I went with a hybrid thumbnails/large images approach to displaying my work on the portfolio page and made a simplified contact form. There were a lot of subtle touches and tough editing that went into the final design and I think it turned out rather well. Now that this is done hopefully I can start some more freelance projects and get back to more regular blogging.
This weekend I finished most of the work on the redesign of my techno band’s website. The site now features a cool abstract background, an improved audio player, and a lot of jQuery effects to drive the interface. I’m pretty excited for it to go live… though the server which hosts the production site has been down all weekend 
I guess that’s what happens with free server space sometimes.
Somehow, no matter much I know before a project starts, something will absolutely stump me during development. As frustrating as this is, it at least gives me an opportunity to learn things as I go and always leaves me feeling better prepared for my next project.
Effigy - The lesson here is that complicated, non-grid designs are best accomplished with a huge background image on the page body. Do this, then just position all the text on top of that and you have a really simple X/HTML page that looks really complicated.
The Washing Machine Man - Ah, my first truly independent web project. This was the first time I set up a MySQL database and a CMS. Doing that seemed so incredibly advanced at the time but now it’s something I casually do in a matter of 15 minutes.
Institute on Race and Ethnicity - The lesson learned here was to not wait until a project is completely finished before going live, especially if there is a current site to maintain. It’s better to avoid waiting for months and just put up a site that’s 95% done.
North Shore Presbyterian Church - A lesson in creating unique menus through absolute and relative positioning is what this site was. Check out the art exhibit page to see what I’m talking about.
Discover and Learn - Setting up this site showed me how incredibly easy PayPal can be to integrate into a website. The code for the buttons is created automatically for you and they host the cart on their servers. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
My Music Site - This site taught me a lot about transparent png files. Achieving a drop shadow around a content box on top of a gradient is only possible using pngs, as are a lot of other advanced layout techniques. Using pngs is always a problem with IE6, but the Unit labs fix was a great find to get around that.
Maybe one day I’ll get to the point where I can tackle an entire project without running into a wall at some point, but from what I’ve heard from developers who have been around since the early days of the internet, there’s no such thing as a project without a ridiculous, unique bug.
Now that I’ve done all that I had hoped with my sample CMS site, sample shopping cart, and portfolio redesign, I’m onto some projects that should be a bit more fun and a lot less work (hopefully).
To begin, there’s the Benno’s Bar and Grill site redesign project. One of my favorite establishments, a place renown for an incredible selection of craft beer on tap, it’s current website falls well short of giving the restaurant a good online presence. Nate and I offered to revamp the site at very little cost and plan to implement a brand new, modern design, an online rating system of the beers on tap, an accurate menu and specials page, and a CMS so that the owners can update the site content as necessary. Most everything is in place and we’re just waiting for the go ahead to put our new design online.
Nate and I also had an idea for a site called MyWikiTrail.net. The site would be another Wordpress blog where we, and other users, will log our often confusing and entertaining paths through Wikipedia. The project will give me an opportunity to create a new design, work with applying themes to Wordpress, and learn the Wordpress end-user features.
Additionally, I am taking two new web programming classes this spring. One class is intermediate Java programming and the other is simply called “Advanced Web Programming” and will be a mixed assortment of database access, advanced javascript, advanced formatting, and more.
Well, I always seem to keep myself busy, usually too busy. I really love nothing more than mastering a new technology or putting the finishing touches on a new design I’m really proud of, so working on new projects really has become quite an addiction for me. Actual paying work has been scarce, but I’ve been putting any free time I have to good use.
Over the last few months I completed a few projects of my own, most notably the redesign of this website. I took a long, steady approach to the site, working 20-30 minutes a day for about 3 weeks before I was finished with what is by far the best version of my web design portfolio I’ve ever made.
I also poured a ton of time and effort into learning all I could about CMS Made Simple. I set up a sample cms website to explore all of the features including photo albums, blogs, forums, comments, web forms, and more. I though I knew a lot about the system before this experiment as I have used it in 5 previous web projects, but now I really see the true power of it all. I cannot think of an easier and more efficient way for a client to maintain a site.
Shopping carts have always been a source of ire in my freelance experience- everybody wants one, nobody really wants to pay for one, nobody is willing to invest the time into setting one up. Therefore, I’ve never actually set up a full shopping cart system. Last month I took the initiative to just set up a cart of my own using Zencart. It’s not a fully functioning online store now, but I think it’s a pretty good shopping cart solution.
Installing this blog was actually yet another project, as it was only recently added- months after the initial site redesign. The purpose of the blog was to learn the ins and outs of Wordpress so that I could have an outlet for delivering news and thoughts about web design and development.
Busy, busy, busy, and more to come.
