Freelance work and site stuff.
October 26, 2002 | 
4 Comments
So, I was told that my biz site, DKR productions, gave the air of being expensive. Funny, I’ve not had much freelance work since I put it up - not that it really matters, most of what I get come from word of mouth. I can’t take much anyway - I turn away more jobs than I take - and in the next few months my real job should be keeping me extra busy.
This week I’ll begin work on a site for the Daisy Bead Company. They make really nice, funky jewelry so I’m looking forward to that. I’m going to try and do an all CSS/XHTML layout. I think the site should lend itself to that. I also might dip my toes into PHP and MySQL with this one. Depends on what they need - for now they just want brochureware and maybe some canned ecommerce stuff. PayPal? If you know some something good, cheap and easy let me know.
As far as Asterisk* goes - I’m going to try and tackle adding the search. I’ve been a bit behind on what I want to do - I’m still adjusting to my new computer - which by-the-way, rocks the house. There are few things I’m not to keen on - one being that the nice little formatting buttons (mainly the URL button) that I should be seeing when doing my Movable Type entries are gone in my Mac browsers. I’m mostly using Chimera, but IE seems to have the same problem.
I’m also planning on uploading more photos to Almost Wordless - I really like how that has turned out. Getting more use out of the old Digital Camera. I also have some updates planned for the flash part of the site. But those might slide a bit.
If that weren’t enough - I’ve thought about launching a magazine type thing, along the lines of A List Apart, which - in case you didn’t know - I’ve written for several times. I’ve got a few more articles in the works, but nobody seems to have time to publish them, so I thought maybe I’d just do it myself. I can’t wait forever, and this way I’d get my stuff out when I wanted to. It’s still in seed phase, but if anyone has any ideas or wants to join in let me know.
Too much to do - to little time.
Filed under: My Sites
Comments
1. ryan said:
dkr,
regarding your Daisy Bead Company site - php/mysql is the way to go! By combining various tutorials and (minimal) programming wizardy I’ve built some pretty robust content managers - archiving/uploads/etc… But, more importantly, mySql is usually free with most hosting plans. I use www.neologism.com. for 5.50 a month you cant go wrong!
I think you should follow through on your magazine idea. I think some interesting issues to tackle would be ‘real world’ design. Building a site from scratch is one thing, but how do you design in an environment (like mine) that forces 14pt Arial and clunky flyout menus. How does the lowest man on the totem pole push usability, legibility, standards, etc?
Posted on October 28, 2002 07:01 AM | #
2. Bob said:
I have found that the PayPal cart is extremely simple to set up, although it’s a little short on features, and since it’s hosted on their site, you can’t REALLY integrate the look/feel with your site. I have some experience setting up a shopping cart for a friend of mine using pre-packaged PHP/MySQL scripts, and they either (a) completely blew, or (b) took a LOT of customization and hacking to get working. In the end, I wrote a simple cart for him (he only has one product), and it seems to work fine for his needs. Good luck!
Posted on October 28, 2002 10:48 AM | #
3. dkr said:
Thanks for the advice - good ideas all. I might just try my hand at the PHP/MySQL solution as kind of a phase 2. They don’t need that functionality right away, and I’d hate to promise something I can’t deliver in a timely manner.
As far as the mag goes I think I might go with it, you bring up a good point Ryan - about putting something together for the worker bees of the Web - I think that could have a place in what I’d like to do. I’ll be in touch when I need some content!
;)
Posted on October 28, 2002 06:33 PM | #
4. Smiley Cat said:
I’d recommend Mal’s Free E-commerce (http://www.mals-e.com/). It is a proven solution, costs $6 per month to accept credit cards, and is easy to implement.
Check out www.gwusa.net to see how I’ve used it (and please excse the home page - they keep changing it and have really buggered it up).
Posted on October 29, 2002 08:03 AM | #
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