UPDATE: I’ve made the switch, finally, to WordPress for my Crystal City Festival Association, Inc. client. This is only the second time I’ve changed their design up and I think it’s a great improvement over their former site. Why? Because it’s WordPress, and that means it’s going to be easy to modify and to keep up to date. Plus it looks a lot more fun and has the groovy spinach in the background. Let me know what you think about it… leave a comment here or on their site.
Spinach Festival Web Site Update
HNY! 2012… Were the Maya right?
We won’t know until December if the Maya were right to end their calendar at the end of the 13th b’ak’tun (or cycle). Maybe they just ran out of room on the old calendar stone or they just got tired of counting and felt 13 was a good number to stop on (actually 13 and 20 were favorite Mayan numbers, according to WikiPedia). It certainly outlasted their own civilization (as it had existed then, probably at it’s height), though the Maya people are still around, at least genetically, if not as a coherent civilization.
My point is, don’t cash in your chips (blue or otherwise) just yet. Let’s take a wait and see attitude. After all, if the end comes in December, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, not knowing exactly HOW our civilization will come to an end. As for the Earth, well I have to believe it’s still got a few billion good years in it. And even if all life on the planet ceases to exist, and as the fossil record shows clearly, there is a very good chance that evolution will continue with whatever organic material is left and the planet will see a repopulation of life again. Of some sort, at any rate.
Business is Slow
Move It, Buster!
And I mean, really slow. I lost another client today to the need for them to be able to modify the site themselves without my intervention (read, charging them for my services). Whoa! That’s what WordPress does. It puts the power of the content into the hands of the average user. But this came as a great shock to me, because I had no warning they were not satisfied with the site. For many years I had maintained the site; that is, when the yearly renewal for web hosting came around I sent them an invoice. Everytime I asked them about updating the site, they always said they were working on new products to show. Never got back with me, never said anything. So now they are gone. I wish them great luck, because they in all likelihood will not find anyone who works as hard as I do, nor as inexpensively.
On other notes, I have been working on the Eagle Pass Chamber of Commerce conversion site and it’s coming along quite well. After many tries with different WordPress themes, I think I finally have the one that will work the best and have the kind of look the Chamber is wanting. I hope so. Now all I need are photos and we’re on our way.
BlueAirMan is stalled; that client just doesn’t have the time to put together the products he wants to sell on the site. Too bad, he could be making money right now.
My final client, Madexalli, is also not providing me with the information I need to fully flesh out her site. I wonder if all web developers have such balky clients? I’m sure they don’t; they probably have clients that want impossible features by the next time. I’ll take the balk over the hair-pulling anyday.
Finally, I am seriously thinking about converting my Candles for Life site over to WordPress using an excellent multi-lingual plugin I found (although I can’t remember the name of it offhand). It will be a heck of a lot easier to maintain and to add pages to. At present, with CodeIgniter and the plugin I’m using to the do the translating, it is a serious job to make changes to any of the pages. Work better, not harder. That’s the ticket!
You Are Here
Do you like this big cubic thingy? This was going to be the logo for my company. Okay, I actually designed it a long time after an older version of the logo I actually use now. It’s really just an idea I had to represent the design and printing aspects of graphic design. The primary printing colors (CMYK), the dimensionality of the cube dramatically demonstrated by the cutaway. The big fat stroke around it – which is cool.
First Entry
I don’t even know if there will be more than one entry, so don’t let the title lead you to think that there will be more in this series. There might not be. I’m definite about my indecision. But that’s not what I really wanted to say.
WordPress
Now that I’ve gotten into WordPress and discovered in the repository plug-ins for just about every application I’ve ever written in PHP through sheer hard work, I have begun to switch many of my clients (those that aren’t really particular about how their web sites work, but more about how they look) over to this framework. So far I have begun to switch over the Eagle Pass Chamber of Commerce, my own website (this one), the Madexalli Cultural Coffee Bar, Blue Air Man and Candles for Life. At the moment, however, the only live site is my own. The others are either waiting for approval or content or both.
The Initial Phase
There has to come a time in any web designers career when he or she looks ahead and perhaps sees nothing but a long, dark tunnel through a mountain of development hours (or some other oddball metaphor) and wonders just what design is really all about. Why do we do it? The short deadlines, the clients with their constantly changing minds, the blank page. I found myself not long ago so bogged down in the details of design, the mechanics of creation, that I missed the bigger picture of what designing was all about. I’m talking about web design, here. I was there, and so was CodeIgniter.
