Create Sean: Journey to Professional Designer

I have almost finished stage 1 of my clients site and we’ll be ready to go live soon. I’ve been working slowly, but steadily on this one. Fortunately my client is in no rush and I am able to really think carefully before doing anything.

Anyhow I’m now starting to think about how to hand off the site to the client for when it goes live. Should I prepare some sort of guide with screenshots on how to update the site. If so should it be online, in MSword/pdf or both? What should be included. One area that concerns me is text styling. When writing something if the client wants to have subheadings how I can ensure that they use h3 or h4 tags rather than just bolding them or typing in ALL CAPS (shudder).

I’m also somewhat concerned about image uploads - how do I ensure that they are resized correctly in order to not break the page layout. I’m sure there are other things to consider, but since this is my first client site, I’m not sure how to proceed.

There is a distinct possibility that I will be taking the train down to where the client lives and provide hands on explanation, but that won’t always be the case. Thoughts opinions?

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Sep 4, 2008 at 02:13 PM
Clients | (3) | | tags: clients |

I downloaded Google Chrome just like the rest of the development community today.  While everything seems to render correctly, I find the interface lacking and was not impressed when I clicked the maximize button and the browser fails to maximize correctly on my 22” vertical profile monitor (I use this one for browsing and coding). I can’t see myself switching any time soon, but will keep it installed for development purposes.

I just did day 2 of the hundred pushup challenge. According to the schedule I should have done 12, 12, 10,10, xx I did okay for the first half of this, but hit the wall in the second half. I did 12, 12, 9, 4, 4. Not exactly a stellar performance. I seem to be about halfway between column 2 and column 3. I might end up repeating week one, but would like to be confident enough to make it to week two without repeating.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Sep 3, 2008 at 02:48 PM
General | (0) | | tags: 100 pushups, browsers |

Today I started the 100 pushup challenge. I’m in column 3 since I did 12 pushups in my initial strength/exhaustion test. I finished it but barely did the final push-ups and couldn’t do level 5 (max at least 7) - but will give that a go in an hour. Hopefully I can do better on day two (Wednesday).

My client has got his hosting straitened away at Engine Hosting. The control panel is quite different from what I was expecting, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it soon enough. There were a couple of issues related to getting sftp to work, but that’s all fixed so sometime this week I’ll be migrating the site to the live server. This is fine even though the site is still in development since no-one is even aware of the old site. I’m hoping to get everything finished early next week.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Sep 1, 2008 at 07:33 AM
(0) | | tags: clients, 100 pushups, personal, hosting |

I’m going to take the 100 pushup challenge. A few weeks ago I bought a chin-up bar and push-up grips and only used them for a couple of days before quitting.

Anyhow I was surfing and found the challenge and have decided this is a great way to build strength. I took the exhaustion test and managed to get 12 pushups which puts me in column 3 for week 1 (the advanced column!). Should be fun.

I’ll be doing push-ups every Mon-Wed-Fri starting next week on September 1.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Aug 29, 2008 at 07:16 PM
(0) | | tags: 100 pushups, personal |

I’ve been working on my latests client site, a language school. Things are going much smoother than expected. The client purchased a template and I’ve now gotten everything moved into various EE templates for embedding and have structured the templates to help with url naming. It’s all filled with text that I’ve chosen, but starting tomorrow I’ll be setting up the various weblogs and categories to get the dynamic content running.

I’ll also need to get the mp3 plugin and flv plugin set up, but that should be relatively easy as I have used both a few times on my personal sites. I’m not sure if things are going smoother because I’m getting better or because I used a pre-built template. I think it’s a little of both with the majority going to the exisiting template. I did have to fix a couple of things in the template, but it was nice to not have to build the CSS from scratch.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Aug 24, 2008 at 01:03 PM
code | (0) | | tags: expression engine, code, css |