Ramble tagged 'Web Design'

I shaved me noggin, I did.

So I may have a hard time convincing you that I’ve been flat out coding and fine-tuning the new site, getting approval from the ISP (InMotion), getting feedback from existing customers, catching up on casting for Brute, maintaining Gruff House correspondence, etc. You may just think I’m full of shit and that all I’ve been doing is looking at half-naked (well, full-naked in some cases) clips of boys all day, making lil squares out of them and sticking them on this page.

But here’s how that really works; I get so focused on our projects that my RSS reader (and email, and friends, and family) is neglected all month, so by the time it’s over there’s around 7000 unread blog posts. Eventually I get sick of looking at that count going up, so I spend a day browsing through them all, bookmark stuff I likes then schedule them in a month’s worth of posts.

So while it may appear as though life is casual and I’m just browsing the inter web all day, at the minute it’s not, and I don’t.

OK, so the site is done and I’m going to let it sit for a little while before taking it live. It gives me the opportunity to remove myself from it for a while and then carry out one last review with a little more objectiveness.

In the mean time, I would appreciate any feedback from anyone that has the time to check it out (yeah you!). Send me whatever you got; bugs, don’t-look-rights, don’t-like-its, don’t-get-its, I’d-change-this’s, this-aint-good-grammars’s, spelling-bads, and so on. Comment here or send email; whatever floats your boat.

If you do get a chance to look over it, feel free to click everything including sending forms. Also keep in mind that I’m trying to make everything as clear and concise as possible for a target customer that is not overly comfortable with web hosting and design; so if you have any ideas for explaining anything with more clarity, please let me know.

Check it out now.

p.s. This is what a visitor will see if they view the site with Internet Explorer 6 or older. It gave me great joy to create this page rather than screw around trying to make the entire site compatible. Great, great joy.

Now I’m off to catch up with casting toys, filing, bills and replying to emails.

I think the site is almost done. Loads more work than I expected, but it should be ready for a preview tomorrow.

Feeling relieved.

I’m gonna go drink wine and eat those truffles that Jon is baking up.

I’ll tell ya about stuff tomorrow.

I had the new site design for Aarfie almost complete. I was thoroughly happy with it, until one morning I managed to pull my head out from the designing/coding enough to see it afresh; and realised it wasn’t cutting it. Jon and I talked it out and decided it needed to be an ultra-clear on-the-grid(ish) layout for the customers we’re targeting. So I started from scratch again and I’m so very glad that I did. The new layout feels right. Here’s a general indication of the old and new.

Progress on the new layout has been put on hold though. I was approached by a lovely lady, that found me via ecopeko, and I decided to take on her project. One more customer example for when we go live won’t hurt. I started that a week or so ago, and it’s all wrapped up now, with only the final handover to go. It’s been another extremely positive experience, helping to bolster confidence in the new business idea.

I’ll post the site once it’s up and running.

We have also caught up on the casting and finished printing the big release of Hello, Brute tees, totes and such.

I found a real estate agent that’s not caught up in the woe is the economy bullshit, who’ll be selling the house for a good chunk of money (keeping positive).

We have been communicating with a lot of great artists on the Gruff House project, and we’re really excited that every one has been interested in getting involved. We’re hoping to keep the schedule for mid-July to take it live.

We’ve been so caught up in work that our days have stretched out to the point that today we got up at 6:00pm and, for some reason, we’re still up now, at 2:00pm. Very tired right now.

And that’s why I haven’t been blogging.

Whatever, it’s fixed now.

The web browsers used by visitors to teejaypee.com

Since Darren is content spending time in the studio, we’ve been getting some work done as well as some sight seeing. I nutted out this web-form (obviously the real pricing has been replaced with random figures) for ecopeko wholesale orders. It may not look like much, but if you view the source you’ll see just how much code goes into making such a thing work. And that doesn’t even include the additional php file that takes all the data, cleans it up and sends it to an email address in a presentable format.

It was a good learning experience, and I think I managed to make it idiot-proof enough without going overboard. You could still enter “7″ for your name for example, but I made the phone number and email address restrictions a little tighter.

There are a bunch of other checks running behind the scenes to prevent alphas in the quantity fields, decimal points where they shouldn’t be and so on. Form submission is also prevented until all required fields are completed.

On the email processing side I added functions to remove all zero fields, sort the data in a sensible order and split it in to sections with headers (“Contact Details”, “Shipping Address” and “Order Details”), so that the order confirmation is as neat as possible.

I’ve also got a start on the Aarfie web site. Here’s how the front page is looking at the minute.

It has been some weeks of heavy computer time for both of us here on Sister Lane. Jon’s working on slickifying his blog and Brute pages as well as getting the Gruffhouse thing started. We’re both really excited about that one. I’ve been helping him where I can.

I wrapped up the WordPress integration of this site, put the Stuff page in hibernation (nothing was happening with that space any time soon) and cleaned up the sidebar (check out my sponsors!) and some other odds and ends. My image viewer got updated along the way and wiped my colour-matching customisation, so I found a neat new viewer called shadowbox (I just had to correct my spelling of colour; I have to spell it “color” for html code and I guess it is becoming an unconscious act now).

Whipped up a quick site for cousin Mike at interactivehealth.com.au. Nothing fancy, although I was quite impressed with myself when I got the dynamic content, in user controllable/addable modules, to fill across the footer like that. He hasn’t done much with it yet (he’s still got the WordPress default links in the sidebar).

Integrated WordPress with the Bear’s site and tweaked the design while I was at it. Said tweaking lead to a little more doodling of bears and various plants, and even a truck. This guy is my favourite though, I think.

Did I need WordPress on such a low-content site? Yes. Yes I did.

There’s a couple of Jon’s old songs kicking around that I plan to play with and publish to the Bears music pool soon-ish. We’re overly focused on the money-making ideas at the minute though. I’ll get to that in a second.

During our breaks from the studio I made the stands for the photography lighting, freeing up the tripod and mic stand for tripodding and mic standing. I nailed some cardboard to the two bedroom windows that have been rudely letting morning light in; the result looks quite OK. Jon made a cake. We ate a cake. We went for a walk on a particularly beautiful day. All of that, looked like this.

The dog has finally stopped freaking out over the growling fridge (ice maker), which makes for a generally happier household. A scared whining dog is a bigger bummer than you may think.

Speaking of bummers, the one I alluded to above and in an earlier post is money related and, as such, not worth much discussion. In short, during my recent trip to Australia, the accountant hit me with an extraordinarily large and unfortunately unexpected tax bill (leftover from year old business activity and due for payment this July) and, just last week, my (ex-)real estate agent has informed me that my investment property (the sale of which was going to fund the tax bill) is worth a whole lot less than what I paid for it a year ago. Between the accountant and the real estate agent, the funds we assumed that we had for the next year are gone. One could say “flushed down the toilet” in the case of the “investment” property.

I was barely functioning for the first couple of days after getting the news on the house, it was hard to escape thoughts of packing up our life here and return to engineering in Australia, but, you know, fuck it. I’ve thrown those thoughts out now.

We’re gonna sell the car. I love that car, but we don’t need it. I’m gonna get more for the property than the quick-sell douche-bag real estate agent quoted and we’re gonna pour ourselves into these business ideas – we’re passionate about them and we’re gonna make them work.

So no whining about money and the economy and that bag of shit. Just getting busy.

I’m not sure what particular fairy-tale Easter is supposed to be about, but I did find it to be a good excuse for a big ole breakfast fry-up and eating enough chocolate to cause break-out.

Since then I’ve been working on bringing various web sites up to scratch for Aarfie. It was wise for me, for the sake of having a true year off, to wait it out until this year before getting started on any business ventures. As soon as I got my teeth in this one, my usual obsessive behaviour kicked in; we’ve been working past midnight since and I’ve been waking up too early with thoughts of code, design and general ideas keeping me from falling back to sleep.

Most of the back end is in place now for Aarfie, with only the billing system to iron out. I expect I’ll just use Paypal. I’ve moved all of the sites I’ve been hosting for years over to the Aarfie domain. Taking control of domain registration and advanced domain name server tools has been easier than I thought it would be and all of the site transfers have been completed without a glitch.

When I contacted the guys back home, that were running with the Organic Group thing, I found that the organicgroup.org site was no longer used, allowing me to delete it. However, as it happened, my good green friend Justine had been tearing her hair out trying to get help with creating a presentable web site and online store for her organic clothing business, so she was over the moon when I got in touch with her.

This turned out to be a perfect place to start, as Justine’s case is a good example of the customer I’m aiming to serve. She’d already spent money on getting an unusable website developed and the people she had talked to since, regarding an improved site, had quoted a lot and talked too much about all the bullshit that means nothing to anyone outside of web site developers.

So Justine has become the first real life customer of Aarfie. She sent me her existing logo, a look-book and a bunch of product photos, and I’ve spent the last week creating a WordPress integrated site and Big Cartel store front for her at ecopeko.com. The WordPress and Big Cartel integration are a vital part of the Aarfie thing, as it has allowed her to take control of everything immediately and the development, support documentation and community is huge and ever-growing for these tools. She is so happy with the results that she has insisted on paying me twice what I asked. I love that girl. I needed her brand of positivity on the project (we had some other shitty stuff go down this week – I’ll talk about it later – that really knocked the wind out of me for a couple of days).

Bringing the Avid site up to scratch has been the focus for the last few days. I’ll be doing the same with the Bears site next as well as this one (the Music and Stuff page sit outside the WordPress admin – I don’t know what I’m doing with the Stuff page by the way, I guess I thought I would have made some “stuff” by now..), so I can use them all for examples. After that it will be customer templates and the actual Aarfie page, with a “this is why we’re unique” spiel and all of that barf. Then we should be ready to go.

Somewhere in all of that we found time to try a new method for resin casting, which has yielded positive results so far. I got lazy towards the end of one of the days in the workshop and left the gloves off during a pour. I spent the next two days picking resin off my hand. I couldn’t even tell it was on there until it started setting.

Jon screen-printed a shirt today to see if the old warped screen for the ice-cream bloke was still OK. It worked well and it got us thinking about our set up for screen printing and excited to get it all happening soon. We set up a clothes hanger in the workshop as a start and we’ve already got the gear picked out from this crowd.

I even managed to fit in a few sessions in the music room this week. I’m trying to do this more regularly.

All up, it has been a pretty productive and rewarding start to the new working life.

I’m happy to say that the transfer to a new host was quick and painless. I moved two more domains over last night, which leaves only two to go before I can cancel my account with the old host. After some comparing, I decided to go with InMotion. I can’t fault them so far.

I mentioned that I was going to post some details of the house and all that we’ve worked on setting up over the last few weeks, but we’ve hopped straight in to working on a big release for Hello, Brute.

I know. Fluid ounces! As if solid(?) ounces weren’t ridiculous enough, now I have to deal with them in fluid form.

Maybe house pics this weekend.

Since Jon and Dakota are busy playing something called Animal Crossing on Nintendo DS, I thought I’d  come follow up on the iPhone viewing feature I mentioned recently.

Clearly I love WordPress. It is the foundation of this blog. One of the great things about it is the plugins; the third party developed, click to install packages that add specific features to your site. Think of a function you would like to implement and chances are there’s already a plug-in that does it or, at the very least, one that provides a decent starting point for it.

The most recent example for me began with the desire for an alternative layout of the site, one that allowed the key content to be loaded quickly and cleanly for mobile viewing. WPtouch, a plug-in by Brave New Code, was the answer, and it is a very very cool answer indeed.

With only minutes required on the install, here’s the result.

The Josh icon resulting from adding teejaypee.com to the iPhone home screen. The custom icon is uploaded into the WPtouch icon pool to be managed by the plug-in.

The teejaypee.com front page as viewed on an iPhone.

Titles can be expanded to reveal an excerpt of the post.

The footer of each page includes a link to normal view (i.e. as viewed on a normal desktop browser). Also note the button indicating the number of comments submitted on a post.

Post pages include the comments form, even down to the recent email notification addition.

Metadata, Share Links, Navigation and Comments are all included on individual post pages.

Landscape viewing is supported.

A link back to iPhone view is also included on the footer of all pages in normal view.

Drop down menu bar.

Customisable links page.

Photo page displays your Flickr RSS.

Archive page displays tag cloud and monthly archives.

Pretty damn tight right? Would you believe it’s free?