News and Blog
Diversifying
Submitted by admin on Tue, 12/07/2011 - 10:17
So I've been doing websites commercially for over a year now. In that time I've created over twenty sites plus some graphic design work and other web work for people and it's been a helluva ride! The fact that I have over twenty happy clients also means that at least some of the business side of things is working out for me as well. I am now getting referrals from previous jobs and people finding sites I've done whilst searching on the web and approaching me for more work that way.
Working with Mixed Ability Clients
Submitted by admin on Fri, 24/09/2010 - 20:47
It's been a really interesting experience working with clients through this website business. People who require a website range from folks who could probably do the job themselves if they had the time through to people who just want a nice, functional website and really need or want to know nothing more.
I like to think that my teaching background gives me particularly good skills in assessing where people are coming from and working out the best way forward. But what I have realised is that this is an area where many, many providers go wrong. They assume every client (whether for websites, electricity, cable TV or anything else) is a uniform entity. Their systems are often designed with the assumption that everyone knows nothing. Then they waste time and patronise people who actually understand what they are talking about. Alternatively some companies employ techies who assume a similar level of knowledge to themselves and get cross and irate when the client needs some explanation.
Discovered Semantic Views
Submitted by admin on Fri, 20/08/2010 - 23:17
Drupal has an unbelievably good module called Views. Views is created by merlinofchaos. I'm guessing that's not what his parents christened him but, like rappers, he has adopted this moniker within his work. Merlinofchaos is something of a God within the Drupal world, responsible for massive developments in the open source CMS. All Content Management Systems are built on top of a database. They do a lot of accessing and writing to and from the database themselves. But sometimes you want to define what goes in to the database and then direct what comes out of the database.
Launch of New Website
Submitted by admin on Fri, 20/08/2010 - 20:25So, time to freshen up my Three Things site. I created the old site in a bit of a hurry using Drupal 7 Alpha 5; really to see how D7 was coming on. This meant that there were quite a few bugs and I found theming it pretty tricky compared to D6. Also, with the alphas there is no upgrade path - each upgrade is a re-install which would quickly have become a right, royal hassle. So... this site is back to Drupal 6, with all the options for contributed modules that holds.