Create Sean: Journey to Professional Designer

Since the fall semester started and I’m teaching again, I’ve been busier than ever. I thought I would be able to update the blog as often as I had during the summer, but between my teaching, private tutoring, working on client sites, and my children it’s been much harder to update than I expected. Nevertheless I expect to update this blog regularly as I proceed into professional web design.

I’m almost finished stage one of my first clients site. The main slow down is getting the content. Client has all the content written in English, but is waiting on his wife to translate it into Korean. Once I get that all done, I’ll have the first stage of the site complete and will recieve the final 30% of the payment and then proceed to stage 2 which involves adding a forum & potentially a photo gallery.

Today I met with my second client, who is also a friend and colleague at the university I teach at.  I now know how to proceed with his site and have recieved all of his content (which is a stack of A4 paper 4cm deep) in hard copy and digital format. I’ve informed him that I will add some of it to fill in the site, but most of the data entry will be his responsibility once the site is ready to go live.

He is also going to use Expression Engine and probably Engine Hosting. I gave him a very good deal on his site since he is a friend and I’m still building up my portfolio. I have also decided that this site will be the last bargain site that I do (other than a redesign of my church site which will be free). Once completed I will now have 2 business sites on my portfolio and enough experience, in my opinion, to charge much closer to what I consider a reasonable price. I’ll also have a better understanding of how long and complex projects are based on client input.

Also due to my being very busy, I haven’t been able to put any time into learning Jquery or javascript. Fortunately for me come December I’m due for another 10 week vacation and will be able to devote more time to that.  In a few days I should be recieving a copy of Moodle E-Learning Course Development for review. Pact Publishing emailed me via my teaching blog about reviewing this book. I’m just waiting for it to arrive and that will be my reading material for the next while.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Sep 12, 2008 at 07:37 PM
| tags: clients, css, jquery, reading, 100 pushups, browsers, expressionengine |

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 | | 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 | | 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
| 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
| tags: 100 pushups, personal |