category: webdesign

Twitter Update (#926285556) Note for future freelance projects: give the client specific instructions on how not to break the site. Else, hours of work are for nought. read more...

 

One Down, One Zillion To Go

Apart from a few minor issues that I need to finish addressing, my freelance gig is complete. The site is done, the client knows how to update it, and I've been paid for my work. Now the trick is to get Chelsea Tipton's website to come up first in the Google rankings for a search on his name, instead of being stuck on the second page of results.

Now that I have one project in the bag (or I will very shortly), I can contemplate my next project: moving and redesigning my blog.

And after that's done, I have a laundry list of projects that will literally never end. Not until I'm dead.

Minor things like editing home videos and outputting them to DVD. Major things like finishing a novel or two. Mundane things like getting my fucking desk clean once and for all. Pragmatic things like updating my resume and portfolio. Creative things like songwriting, or photography, or scrapbooking. Oh, Lordy, the scrapbooking. I haven't even finished scrapbooking our honeymoon, and we celebrated our 5th anniversary this past May.

Whenever I hear someone say they need a hobby, I want to invite them to have one of mine. I have more than I'll ever use up.

 

FAIL.

Not sure if I'm relieved or totally pissed... but I just solved in half an hour what I've been trying to puzzle out for six, count 'em, six hours.

If only I would have Googled the right words when I started.

See, I want to include a list of upcoming appearances on my client's website, and I knew Google Calendar would be easily updated and — I thought — easily pulled into WordPress and styled just so. Turns out it's not quite as simple as all that.

Well, actually, it is, now that I've found the plug-in and don't have to write the damn thing from scratch. *headdesk*

Granted, I learned a lot about XML parsing in PHP during my research tonight. I also reinforced the unfortunate truth that I really can't just go out and learn the piece of a technology that I need RIGHT NOW without first learning more of the foundations. I'd put myself at a beginner-plus level of PHP. Parsing XML? That totally requires at least a novice level. At least I know enough to tweak the code in the plug-in now, I guess.

I still have a decent amount of work to do before the site is complete, and I couldn't really afford to spend so long on this one problem, but I still think it was time well-spent.

And I'm still including this evening in my billed hours. Totally.

PS - I'm getting really tired of Movable Type showing me a blank screen after just about anything I do with this blog anymore. I'm hoping a clean install will fix these annoying issues... but that's going to be easily another month, if not more.

 

Little Bit of Everything

I don't do these massive update posts much anymore — I prefer to keep my blog entries on one topic at a time — but I figured I'd do one catch-up post, then maybe expound on parts of it later. So, working backwards from today...

Weighed in today at 196.5 lbs on my home scale — that's one and a half pounds away from my recent all-time low of 195 from May 2007. (Yep, I gained 15 pounds in six months, and it took me longer than that to lose it again.) It was a bit of a disappointment, then, to weigh in at my Weight Watchers meeting at 200.4 lbs, even after I had an ultra-light breakfast and didn't drink much water before the weigh-in. My mini-goal had been to weigh in under 200 pounds at the meeting. Oh, well — I guess I'll wait until next weigh-in to hit my mini-goal, and to reward myself with some shorts and dress pants and blouses that fit.

My supervisor asked me this morning if I'd like to attend a User Group meeting in Lansing (two hours away) this Thursday. Then she asked me if I could drive, since her car doesn't have air conditioning. D'oh! So, I'll be getting up at the buttcrack of dawn on Thursday, driving with my supervisor for two hours, attending four hours of Business Intelligence lectures and panels, then having lunch and driving two hours back. At least we don't have to work for the last couple hours of the day; basically, my day gets shifted forward by two hours.

I landed a freelance web design gig yesterday. Actually, I pretty much "landed" it last Wednesday, when he asked me if I do web design, but yesterday's client meeting was the first official sealing of our new business relationship. He's the resident conductor of a local orchestra, so I'm basically making him a PR tool, which is perfect work for me. I underpriced myself, as per usual, but I made sure to leave myself an out: a flat fee for the first 20 hours, then an hourly fee for the next 20, topping out at 40 hours. So, I won't have totally hosed myself.

This past weekend, Aaron and I went up to the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. Great time, as always. I took a few pictures (with the Holga, too, although I'll have to wait until those are developed to post them), and I bought one expensive thing and one not-so-expensive thing.

Oh, and I still need to get this blog moved to its new home on another web host, and not just because something's borked with my MT installation/upgrade (as you will have noticed if you tried to comment on a post lately — your comments ARE going through, I promise). I have until the end of August to get my stuff moved — which, incidentally, is also the deadline for getting my freelance site done. I'm going to be looking at some mighty busy evenings here. I'll need to carefully ration out my time.

And now I should get to bed, because I need to ready myself for my epic early-morning wakey-wakey in another day or so. I haven't gotten up at 5:30am since... um... well, it's been a while. Not counting jet lag in another timezone, of course.

 

End of an Era

I finally did it.

After turning the thought over in my head for months now, I finally submitted my resignation as LSM webmaster.

It's nothing against them. It's just a reorganization of priorities for me. I can only handle so many projects at a time, and can only keep focused on so much. I'm sure that there is someone actively participating in the corps who has HTML skills and can do just as good a job as I did. Or better, probably.

I just haven't been devoting the amount of time to the website that the corps deserves, and it's been like that for quite a while now. LSM deserves more than I'm currently giving them. And I deserve to be cut free of the guilt I've been giving myself over that very issue.

The announcement feels like a weight lifted from my mind.

 

Mixed Feelings

Some of you may remember the drum corps website I worked on back in '05. Well, it seems that the corps is "streamlining" their communications, and they'd like to retool the site. That's fine. I can dig that. I can even use the design they'd like me to use, although I insist on trying a few different variations on it first.

The only thing that really makes me sad is that I worked SO HARD on getting the content management system to be robust enough to serve their needs, and now the site is pretty much going to be a static electronic brochure. No individual member logins, no real need for members-only news items... they'll keep the news feed around, and they'll keep the schedule up-to-date, and I think they'll keep the file upload feature for staff, but it's not the same. The site will mainly be used as a recruiting tool, rather than the multifaceted communications tool I'd wanted it to be.

Maybe I wasn't proactive enough. Maybe I didn't keep up with it as well as I should have. But I did what I was told, when I was told, and I was so proud of what I'd achieved. I learned so much by programming all that, and I was actually pretty proud of my design. (I went through lots of thumbnails and comps to get to that final.)

Maybe this is my chance to make something that really pops, though. I can take the site and streamline it all to hell. I won't be depressed about this — I'll be grateful for the chance to update this two-year-old design.

Really, I will.

 

Nuts-N'-Bolts

For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why must I have these fantastic ideas like, Let's put the menu for my portfolio site in the bottom left corner! That way, I won't be able to use the standard nested unordered list to stylize my menu, and I'll have to come up with some effed up way to rig it! Yeah, that sounds like fun!

I feel like the answer is obvious, yet it eludes me. I'm sure that a.) it's just a little late at night for actual mental activity to be successful, and b.) upon a proper Googling later, the answer will present itself.

In the meantime, anyone who'd care to school me on how daft I'm being right now is welcome to take a gander at my portfolio in progress. I just want the goddamn submenus to stay visible. *sigh*

It's a very basic problem. I just need more sleep to conquer it.

 

Accomplishment

"Task" for potential employer: done.
Time to complete: 10.5 hours.

I've never coded someone else's website layout before. I liked it. Could be that my calling is strictly as a web developer, not a designer. That, plus I'm a grammar nazi. When I'm plugging in content, I *have* to correct comma splices and misspellings. Web copy editor, anyone?

Now, it's time to focus on following up with other companies to whom I've submitted a resume online. I am armed with legal-size paper and a full clip of determination.

I have three months to land a job in my field. Granted, if I don't, I get to take home a decent chunk of severance pay... but it's not worth it to waste job-hunting time and possibly miss the job for me, just to stick around and get my severance. You know?

 

Life Is Good.

Furniture was delivered Saturday afternoon. Only major downside was that the old couch didn't fit through the basement door, so the entire point of buying a new couch (so we could put the old one in the basement) was nullified. On the upside: we have a giant, nine-foot pillow-back sofa on which to lounge; a new, smaller dining room table with non-80's chairs and a bench; and after our return from Nihon, we will have a new massagey recliner.

In other news, Aaron has determined the status of his passport. Due to our change in departure date, it hasn't yet been processed, even though he applied for it back in February. It has now been expedited, and should be on its way by week's end. Which is still calling it close, and may mean that we'll need to obtain our Ghibli Museum vouchers after we arrive in Nihon instead of in advance.

Weight has stabilized at 198 pounds. I'm OK with that for now. Slow and steady weight loss means it's more likely to stay off. I won't make my goal of 190 by Japan, but so be it. I still intend to eat heartily while we're on vacation.

I am SO almost done with my freelance project. I'm hitting some snags with programming the content management system, and I'm going to just have to set some strictures on what it can and can't do. I can't make it account for every possible instance of weirdness. Hopefully, the client will be accepting of that. Honestly, though, I'm really just glad to have it done. I don't know if I'll get the remainder of my pay by the time we leave for Japan, which is unfortunate... but, again, I'm OK with that. Between Aaron and myself, we have enough money saved up to have a sufficiently good time.

Yes, indeed... life is good.

 

Productive

Finished the initial roll of film in the Brownie Starmite. Today was appropriately sunshiny, so I took identical photos to yesterday's overcast ones, plus some others to pad out the roll. Wrote a check to Dwayne's Photo for $14, packed up the film, and will be shipping it off tomorrow morning. I expect to have twelve 4" x 4" prints in my hot little hands by May 1st.

Put away the mess of clothes on the floor by the bed. Went into the small bedroom and arranged all of our board games on a small plastic shelving unit in the closet. (Damn, we have a lot of board games. Trivial Pursuit especially.) Moved my empty steamer trunk from the small bedroom to beside my nightstand. Sometime in the near future, I'll be going through the linen closet and moving blankets into the trunk to make room for the new sheets I intend to purchase.

Submitted the new freelance site to Google for spidering and indexing. I'm planning to use a Google search for the site search, so a good spidering by Google would be a definite plus. Still have a lot to do... I'm not going to end up getting everything done this week that I told them I would. I knew I was giving myself a mighty tall order, what with the laundry list of stuff I had yet to do. Not to worry. It'll get done well before the Japan trip. Hopefully by the end of April, if not sooner.

Paid my credit card bills. A simple task, but still one that makes me feel... satisfied? Relieved? Accomplished? Meh. It's done, anyway.

Paying bills is going to get more interesting in July, when Sky changes over to Huntington's payroll system. Bi-weekly instead of semi-monthly. This will take some getting used to, after being paid on the 15th and the last day of the month for the past 4½ years.

 

One Week Till Relaunch?

Stayed up a little too late last night after getting home from Easter festivities in Cleveland. Woke up this morning, way late and bleary-eyed, and decided to use one of my personal days. After all, I need to get my freelance project done this week, and there are a few important parts that aren't done yet. So, I stayed home, slept in a little, and worked for about four hours total on that.

I'm realizing that creating my own content management system (CMS) from a flat-file database is a little more challenging than I'd thought it would be. I thought it would be ridiculously simple, but it's really not. I'd really rather use SQL, but enabling SQL on my client's webhosting would cost them extra from their webhost. I'm highly tempted to just tell my client to edit the file themselves as needed, and upload it via FTP... but I know I should really afford them a way to edit their news and such in the browser itself.

I spent long enough figuring out how to check a username and password against a flat-file db, and remembering how to get PHP to remember that the user has logged in, via session variables. I finally had some ideas about how to edit and delete records after being flummoxed for quite some time... but I got sidetracked by Japan trip stuff, and never got back to coding, and now my brain's winding down enough that I'm not going to attempt it now. Maybe tomorrow after work. I'm thinking about feeding the db into an array to display it, then editing the array and spitting the whole array back out into a new file, overwriting the old. Should work, right...?

Back to work tomorrow. Meh. I'm looking forward to finishing this freelance job so I can a.) invoice the client, and b.) finish up my resume and portfolio redux in preparation for the pre-Japan job-hunting blitz.

 

The Not-Really-Big Reveal

For anyone who's been interested in what my freelance gig is and how it's turning out, I thought I'd share with you the HTML mock-up I've created for my client. They chose this design out of over half a dozen Photoshop composites, and I spent this week creating a stylesheet that I can plug their content into. After I do that, there will be some content-management issues to tackle and some bells and whistles to add.

So, there you have it: the midpoint of my freelance project. I think it's some of my better work, IMHO.

 

Freelancing Update

Looks like the HR issues I was having with my contracting job may have been ironed out. I wasn't able to connect with the contact person to do the training on how to use the online timeclock, but she had sent me the Word file that explained the process. I had thought that a phone conference with this person was a requirement... but it seems that I am able to log in and record my hours, so that issue may be resolved.

This is good, since I finished a four-hour project this past Wednesday and have already been presented with another, more involved but similar project due by next Thursday.

My main contact there said that they could potentially give me enough work for a 40-hour week, but also mentioned that the summer months are the slow season for their firm. I'm not comfortable with the idea of relying on freelance and contract work to keep me financially afloat, even with a relatively steady inflow of work from this particular firm. Like I've said before: if it were just me, I might be more inclined to take the plunge. But I'm beyond the carefree "oh shit how do I buy food this week" days of my youth, and I can't afford to jeopardize my half of the mortgage and car and insurance payments, or my student loans and credit cards and whatnot. That narrow window of financial spontaneity has officially closed, and I now crave stability.

I also have new comps due to my freelance client by Monday. They happened to choose the design I liked the least, but because its main features (rounded corners) matched some of their previous marketing materials. Once I had a copy of their existing flyer to give me ideas, and vector versions of the logo and logotype, along with their ideas on what they wanted to incorporate into the new comps from the old, I felt much more prepared to give them what they wanted.

It's shaping up to be another working weekend of sorts. As long as I'm getting paid, though, I'm OK with it.

 

Step One Complete

Four composites are now completed and posted on a private website for my client to peruse. One of them totally sucks, one could become something decent, and two of them are actually not bad. Truth be told, I really like one of them, but it's the most totally boring one of the lot. Says something about my style and personality, maybe, that I prefer the muted and beige and straitlaced design over the one(s) with bold colors and rounded corners and other elements I don't usually use.

I sent the link to my clients around 9pm this evening; my self-imposed deadline was tomorrow. I said I'd have a completed website in four to six weeks once we finalize the design, and I think that sounds completely reasonable. The only issue is going to be figuring out how to allow them to make additions to content without using a database. (From what I can tell, it would cost extra on their hosting plan.) Their usual modus operandi is Frontpage, as I've mentioned before, and I'm afraid it would wreak havoc on any design I would throw out there.

We'll come up with something. I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

 

Definitely A Learning Experience

I gave myself one week to come up with three to five composites for my website redesign client. No problem — I did similar projects with similar deadlines in college. VCT, graphic design, yeah. No problem.

I hate all of my ideas.

No, let me rephrase: I can't seem to translate the ideas in my head to something that looks good on-screen. I feel like I'm missing lots of the finer details and the subtleties that I admire in other designers. Shadows, patterns, gradients, tiny lines and shapes and ornamentations that just aren't popping into my head. The 4x3" ballpoint pen drawings look like drawings of decent web page designs; my Photoshop comps look like a VCT 102 student put them together.

Maybe trying to take design cues from my favorite designers isn't the best way to go. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself because of it. In any case, I have one evening and two weekend days to finish at least one and a half comps, if not more, and preferably improve on what I already have completed. If I have to give them crap and say they're first drafts, I will, but I'd rather give them awesome comps and just let them choose what kind of website they want.

It's just so frustrating. I finally have the opportunity to wow a client with my flair... and now... *pfft*

 

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