#website

Ho Ho Ho…

Christmas morning and I’m on the computer already… sad? dedicated? driven?… bored. Still working away on the new site, so hopefully it will be done before too long.

Interesting question from a friend last night regarding how much time I spend on my own projects & websites – he asked me to explain “why you’re putting in so much work into it”. My answer wasn’t that thorough or convincing, but, I believe that there are a number of things you can get out of running a website like mine.

  1. Honing of personal skills: building this site gave me a chance to work out a complex CSS/XHTML layout, while integrating a dynamic content management system and honing a search system!
  2. Giving something back: considering how much the web community has given me in the form of code, knowledge, skills, tips & tricks, this site is a minor return-favour
  3. Educating people: building information on this site gives me a focus point where I can send current and potential clients to find out about IA, usability and general user-centred design.
  4. Publicise my projects: making a site which people like to come back to gives me a place where I can promote my projects and get them out in the public
  5. Raise my profile: no point beating around the bush, one of the reasons I maintain an active website is that it raises my profile in the web community/industry. These days anything that can do that for you without spending a truckload of money is a Good Thing.

More Projects To Come

The main 2 sections of the site to be completed are the projects (still have some micro-sites to put together here) and the search system. I will also need to bring across the copyright info from the old site, but that will largely be copy/paste. The search system will be the most interesting part to develop, and I have some nice plans for it as well – We’ll see what I can do as far as combining 2 XML documents and an XSLT together (server-side using PHP of course!) to create the results.

The projects really could use a little work, but I just don’t have time to work on them right now. Once the site is live, I will be working on RESTments again to get that going, and then when that is up, the projects will all receive a make-over to ensure that they work with PHP’s register_globals off and magic_quotes_gpc off as well. I will also eventually get to working on new versions of webpad (which I have some great plans for) and AvantBlog (want to make a few versions, so that there is one for each major type if possible.

So now, with no other external contracts to take up my time, it is just a matter of not falling asleep and then all I have to do is my website, should mean that it’s up within a week or 2.

Slowly, slowly…

I am making progress on the new site. It is taking longer than I had hoped, but that is mostly because I actually took the time to enjoy my holiday, rather than spending the whole thing working on this 🙂

I am currently working on the Services section, which will include details about all of the things that I can do for clients, including some “elevator-pitch” style descriptions of what some of the things mean, since it’s likely that they will be new concepts for a lot of people I deal with. I am going to be trying to simplify things as much as possible with the descriptions, and provide examples or diagrams if at all possible!

It’s times like these that I wish CELIA was active already and filled with useful information and resources, then my job would be simple 🙂