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Content in the Projects Category

Business in the Toilet

That's right, you read the title of this post correctly. My business is officially on the toilet. Notice what I said there, it's "ON" the toilet, meaning I've decided to get involved in a little project that has me creating art on toilet tanks.

Posted: Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Tee Shirt Nut Up and Running

A few months back I talked about the side project site where I could display my {love} for T-Shirts. Well it's finally finished, but if the frequency with which I blog here is any indication, I don't expect to be burning up the internet with content. Simply put, I got the design and the structure exactly how I wanted it. There might be a few tweaks here and there (I'm not exactly happy with the header), but it's up functioning and ready for content.

Posted: Tuesday, April 20, 2010

We Are Changing

I don't know if I wanted to call this a change or a maturing. This blog has served me very well over the past few months, but now it's time to change a tad so that we can keep up with the times and the growing need of my readers. With that said, I'm officially able to say that we've grown up in a big way.

As many of you know i started this blog as an experiment really, on how to build, attract, analyze and maintain a website. What I didn't expect, was for people to actually call me and offer me gigs on doing those vary things for them. We'll call them "clients", or "friends" in need of a face lift. Well I'm no surgeon, but I can dissect a website fairly well, and I can tell what's going to work and what isn't.

However, I couldn't do it all alone, so I had to hire someone. Then I quickly figured out that there was really too much work for two people to do, so I hired a third. Yup, that's right. There are now three of us working for "Yet To Be Named Company".

Posted: Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Moving on with TeeShirt Nut

You can see by the picture below, that the content has come along nicely, but there are still some formatting issues that need to take place. What you are seeing below is the before picture. As you'll notice the formatting is way off when it comes to comments.

Posted: Monday, December 14, 2009

Tee Shirt Nut Day 2

As you can see from the image below, I've made some good progress with the T-Shirt website. At this point it's been all style, but we are quickly approaching the techincal pieces.

Posted: Monday, December 07, 2009

Day 1 Look of a Nut

I thought today we would start off by looking at the current site and how it looks. I had to change the background of the site because I couldn't stand looking at the plain white any longer.

Posted: Friday, December 04, 2009

Beginnings of a T-Shirt Nut

Anyone who knows me, knows that I like T-Shirts. One of the reasons I like T-Shirts so much is because I have a fully functioning printing business to facilitate my need for new and interesting styles to wear. One of the reasons I started a printing business was because I could never find the style/size/design that I wanted. This is the same reason that I started using Django to create my websites, I just couldn't find a product that did everything I wanted.

So, as I've mentioned before I wanted to create a new site that I can discuss T-Shirts and in those cases where I've created something, possibly sell them. The difference here is that it's got to be different than the tons of other Tee sites that are out there.

Here's what I want the new site to be like......

Posted: Friday, December 04, 2009

Products Sites

Today I find myself working on a new project that is somewhat different that the usual website that I'm asked to build. What I'm working on is a website that is product based, and not so much "news" related. These types of small projects are fun because they take you away from the "normal" development that I do for a "typical" client.

This client also gave me free artistic reign to develop whatever I felt necessary to get the products point of view across. Basically the message to me was:

Make it look good and help us sell a lot of this stuff.

Posted: Saturday, November 21, 2009

Newsroom CMS

As you may recall from a previous post (I'm In The News), I have a client that has asked for a fairly simple CMS to publish their daily news. Currently, they have no CMS and more importantly, they have no archiving and the website is built by hand two times a day. In addition to there not being a CMS, there is also no way to publish the next days edition unless someone is sitting at the controls and does it manually.

In a day and age of many open source CMSs, it baffled my mind to no end why a very large company didn't have a system in place that would provide this functionality. After working with the developers and content editors for a while, it dawned on me why there has never been a good solution. The products on the market today simply aren't customizable enough.

Posted: Wednesday, November 18, 2009

I feel like a bad host

It feels like it's been forever that I've been here and communicated with you about the projects I'm working on. I even got an email asking "Have you Quit?". No No, quite the opposite actually. I've been so busy that it's hard to find any free time outside of projects and family to dedicate to writing. However, tonight I was able to find that time and jot a few notes down.

So here's an update on how a few of my latest projects are going.

Posted: Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Making Things Fresh

The last few weeks have been extremely busy. I appears as though everyone needs something as the end of the year draws near. Luckly for me, I love what I do and hearing from less active customers about new work is a lot of fun.

One of my very first customers was a private label company that is now looking to redo the whole customer interface to their website. Meaning, they don't like the way the website looks and they want to revamp the whole deal. This is one of those projects that I like but it stings a little bit at the same time. You see, I was the original designer on this project, and now they are telling me that my design has outlived it's usefulness and that I need to come up with something different.

Posted: Friday, October 23, 2009

Lets Debate This

Finally it's time for something fun. From time to time I get in those friendly arguments with my friends about which of two things are better. You know, Bud Lights better than Coors Light, or Superman could kick the crap out of Spider-man. Whether or not any of this is true, really isn't the point, it's the debate that ensues that generally makes for a good laugh and a heck of an interesting night.

So I thought to myself, why not create a site for me and my friends to post the pieces we feel are debatable. That's right, put our little friendly debates online and see if others agree with us or not. With the power of Django behind us, it really shouldn't be that hard at all. In fact we should have a working example up fairly soon.

Posted: Tuesday, October 06, 2009

It's Time for a Project Section

As I said in my earlier post, I really need to create a section on this site dedicated to projects. I'm constantly asked for my portfolio, and I can't think of a better way to display my work than to create a "projects" section to the website. As I think about such a section, there is a ton of things that need to be accounted for.

For instance, how much meta data do you really need? Probably not that much. I would probably be easy enough just to have a title and textarea for entering information. Since I use filebrowser in my textarea with tinymce, it would make formatting the text pretty easy.

Posted: Monday, September 28, 2009

Out With The Old and Into the New

Things are starting to really heat up around here and lot of clients are trying to get ready for the big Christmas rush. Everyone wants their website to be ready for when the masses start shopping online this year. Well you are shopping online this year aren't you?

Whether you are or you aren't, I have two clients that need their websites updated with a new design and feel before the big rush comes on. It just so happens that in this case the websites in question are sites I put up a while ago for some colleagues that decided to go it on their own and see what online retailing was all about. In one case, online sales never got going, but their contact information caught on like wildfire. The site has become outdated, and now it's time for a refresh.

Posted: Saturday, September 26, 2009

I'm in the News

Ok, I might not "actually" be in the news, but I have been commissioned to build a news site with all the bells and whistles that one might expect from a major online publication. This particular project has some really interesting and unique aspects to it that immediately got my creative mind working. Like anyone when you decide to become a freelancer, you're painfully aware that you're only as good as the last paying project. So if this puppy fails, I probably wont see any additional revenue from them, nor will I have the chance to explore exciting new projects. But, the current project is something that I think i can turn into something very cool and hit every one of their requirements on the head. In addition to that there are some bonuses that I can throw in to make sure they are setup for enhancements in the future.

Posted: Thursday, August 20, 2009

We Should Start Getting Nutty

While I wait for my client to get back to me with some contract stuff and some initial requirements, I thought I might start on my TeeNut site. When I start with a website, I like to think of the content I want to produce before I come up with a full blown design.

Starting with a design is something you can do, however I prefer to know the available pieces of content before I start a design. So for this one, I'm going to show you how I created it, from soup to nuts. I thought the nuts thing was rather appropriate.

Posted: Tuesday, June 09, 2009

I'm Nuts for Tshirts

I know that I had said yesterday that I was starting a 2 new projects, and yes that is the case, but I guess I wouldn't be me if I didn't start something else that I don't have a bunch of time for. Yup that's right, I've started a new little project for myself that allows me to keep up with all of my tshirts.

For those of you that know me really well, you know that I'm somewhat of a non dress up type of guy, and more of the hang out in a tshirt type of guy. I'm not about to make fun of those that like to wear nice shirts and pants, it's just that I'm more comfortable in a tshirt, jeans and sandals. So with that said, I'm sure you can guess what kind of site I'm going to create. Yup, that's right, a site dedicated to the shirts that I make, and how I make them.

Posted: Monday, June 08, 2009

Let Me Show You

I keep getting the question of where might someone view my portfolio. Which is actually a really good question, especially if your looking for someone to build you a website. If I were trying to hire a web designer, I would be looking at that person's portfolio to see what kind of style they have. Not only that, but I would be looking to make sure that they posses the ability to design multiple style sites. Generally speaking that means that one should have a portfolio of sites to show people.

I've decided to take that one step further and start my portfolio here, and show you how I can build additional websites with very different styles. I also want to prove that I've got the techniques to not only build a site, but do the things that are necessary to get noticed by search engines. Over the next several days and weeks, I'm going to build a site that will not only be live but demonstrate how I build the site completely from scratch.

What kind of site am I talking about?

Posted: Thursday, April 30, 2009