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.

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!

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.

This is the sigil I really use (here ↑) representing the name of my company – square bones. A visual metaphor: cross-section of a square bone – if there were such a thing – square on the outside and round on the inside. The outer stroke represents the artificial restraints man puts on his world, molding it to his own design, making it uniquely his (or hers). The circular middle stroke is nature juxtaposing itself against, and demonstrating its ir·re·press·ibil·i·ty {had to look that word up} toward, man’s artifice. The inner square just needed to be there to make it complete. The colors are calming and are nearly complimentary. It’s easier on the eye than the cmyk cubic, anyway, but maybe not as outspoken.

I like this one too – a lot. But it was for a different company I owned – same thing, different name.

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.

Madexalli

Madexalli is very close to being complete, but is lacking photos and words and some direction. I’m thinking it should have a list of all the various items they sell such as their coffees, teas, drinks, bakery items and lunch specialties. They also sell music, and so I need to list the various titles they sell. But all that needs to be supplied to me.

BlueAirMan

Blue Air Man is a project long in progress. It’s going to be a store site selling unique gift items to graduates of Lackland Air Force Base. Needless to say, the items they sell are military-type and designed specifically for Lackland (I’m the designer of many of them). The owner is a full-time teacher, though, and so has very little time to work with me to populate the site and set up all the little things necessary to make e-commerce work.

Chamber of Commerce

The Chamber of Commerce is ready to go live with their new site as soon as we get permission from the board and populate the site with photos of Eagle Pass. It has a calendar of events and membership database, both of which are plug-ins that work pretty well and much like the applications I wrote using CodeIgniter for their previous site. The gut-buster was switching all the data from the membership database to the plug-in. That took some time and a whole lot of typing.

SellItNow! Eagle Pass

One more site I’m working on is for myself and will be a classified advertisement site for use by residents of Eagle Pass (and surrounding smaller communities). I see it as an alternative to what they call a newspaper in this town and the local radio station’s compro y vendo (buy and sell) show that invites callers to try and describe the items they are selling. I figure I can offer them the opportunity to display their items using photos as well as descriptions. I found a cool plug-in for that one too.

Changing Frameworks – Changing Paradigms

Don’t get me wrong, now. For creating fast web sites web sites fast (if you get my meaning), it was the best framework and a coder’s best friend – it saved me countless hours of development time for even complex applications – but it still required mind-numbingly long hours of work. Hours I wasn’t spending even considering the design aspect of web design. And there was/is no design framework to make that any easier. So to speed things up, I started looking at ready-made web templates, but then I had to adapt them to work with CI, and that still took many more hours than I wanted, and sometimes in the end, I didn’t really like the template I had chosen. Well, there goes those hours out the window. And then I spent who knows how long tinkering and refining the code, and doing researching to find an answer when I hit a programming wall.

In the end, there was very little profit made for the time spent just fooling around with the damning code and the damned design. Web design suddenly become more than I could bear on my own. So I just rejected the whole thing. Decided I would go back to just graphic design and abandon the web altogether as a medium. That last a couple of months.

Then came the day I found WordPress. It was a revelation, like unto the the day I discovered CodeIgniter in the depths of my despair at writing [X]HTML/CSS from scratch. Sure, I’d dabbled in other CMS frameworks (Joomla, Drupal and some others) but they just didn’t fit in with my gestalt. Too complicated, to steep a learning curve, ugly. Just that – ugly. I needed something that might not be as slim, trim and quick as CI, but something that I could go to sleep at night and not worry about having to deal with the next day. And WordPress seems to be it. It’s lovely, it’s fairly easy to work with, there are scads of fine templates out and about designed/programmed by really talented people, and maybe now I have a shot at continuing to be a web designer without worrying about what’s happening in the basement (don’t know what I mean by that, actually).

So to be, or not to be…a web designer. It’s still up in the air, but I also still have clients with web sites, and all of those based on CodeIgniter. Can’t quite give up on that framework yet, but I now have a fall-back; and once they decide it’s time to redesign their sites, it’s WordPress all the way.