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.

Overall I’m very happy with the progress of my move into web design/development. I would like to have more time to develop my knowledge of javascript and perhaps delve into some of the support for css3 in newer browsers. I’m particularly excited about @font-face and rounded corners.

In other news I’ve completed week 2 of the 100 pushup challenge. I’ll be doing the second strength test this weekend, but am not sure I’ll be able to stay in column 3. I know I’ll be able to do column 1 and probably 2 which means I won’t have to repeat week two. Still I’d rather stay in column three though I’m really doubting I’ll be able to do that. We’ll see on Saturday evening.