blog | The End of 2009 | CreateSean Web Design

The End of 2009

Thursday December 31 2009

Today is the last day of 2009. Personally I have had a pretty good year. From a business perspective it hasn’t been very successful. Only two clients, one of which flaked out on me mid contract. My second client site of the year should be finished as very soon. I’m just waiting on access to the the hosting server to transfer files and then complete testing on paypal integration. For some reason I’ve never been able to get the paypal sandbox to work when using localhost—even with a no-ip internet address set up.

For my current client I switched designers and have a kick ass design to show off once the site goes live. I will additionally be using this same designer to redesign this site and blog.

Now on to 2010. I really need to figure out a way to attract clients. Here in Korea, due to my limited Korean language skills, I’m really limited to the English speaking expat community. This makes it extremely difficult to get local clients. My current client is also looking for a redesign of a magazine site which I will be taking on. I’m also waiting to hear back in the first week of January from a designer about doing the development for one of her clients.

Ideally I would love to regularly do development for other designers. I find development interesting and fun to do and have little talent for design.

During 2010 I’ll be ramping up my plans to move back to Canada. You can read more about that over at Repatriate Me! where I blog my plans to move as well as pictures and videos of life in Korea. It’s all about transitioning—what I’ll miss about Korea, what I’m looking forward to in Canada and all the paperwork involved in moving a family back to Canada including getting a visa for my wife and ensuring that my Kids have their Canadian citizenship and are ready for English schools. In summer 2010 I’m making a scouting trip to Ottawa to look at housing, schools, business regulations, talk to banks and a bunch of other things I haven’t even thought of yet.

I’m also going to let EEforums4You expire due to a lack of business. I launched last April or so and have only received two jobs in that time. Clearly there isn’t as large a market as I had thought. I was expecting to get 1-2 forums a month but that never materialized so I’m going to let it go.

This past week I started reading PHP for Absolute Beginners and am now in chapter 3. There is a lot of jargon and concepts that I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around. But I am planning on working my way through the book and doing all of the exercises. Once I’ve finished that I would like to learn some basic CodeIgniter so that I can start developing add-ons for ExpressionEngine. My first add-on will likely be a subscribe to comments without commenting plug-in/extension. I think that’ll be a plugin but at this point am not exactly sure.

Also with PHP I figure I need to come up with a couple of projects so that I can continue to practice and not forget anything that I have learned. My only plan at this point is the “subscribe w/o commenting” add-on. Maybe I’ll start scouring the forums looking for add-on requests that haven’t been filled and build a couple of those. But first I need to get the basics down.

Looking back on my 2009 goals I achieved 1, 4 and to a point 6. I did redesign this site, but did it myself and while it looks better than the first version I recognize that it is a little flat looking. Anyhow as soon as I get the final payment from my current client I’ll be paying my designer to make a smoking hot design for CreateSean.