Latest news
March 19th, 2008I’ve been fairly lax in updating this site in recent months, but I’ve not exactly been idle. For starters, I’ve been involved in the relatively new and exciting task of looking after our baby son who is 5 months old at this point. A jolly wee soul he is as well.
On the client side of things, I’ve been keeping the work to a minimum of late in order to spend more time with my family but some odds and ends have been getting done. I recently built a site for Leith based stained glass artist, Andrew Johnston.
http://www.andrewjohnstonstainedglass.com/
Glenalmond House
October 19th, 2007I recently completed work on the Glenalmond House site. Glenalmond House is the second site I have built for Fiona and Jimmy, the first being the Turret Guest House web site. Fiona and Jimmy recently purchased Glenalmond House, a fantastic guest house in Edinburgh’s South Side.
As always, it was a pleasure to work with them and I wish them all the best for their new venture.
Increased awareness of accessibility?
July 24th, 2007From recent experience, awareness of web accessibility seems to be on the increase. Certainly it’s something which a number of companies have now moved higher up their priority list. This can only be a good thing.
I have always been of the belief that the internet is an enabler, both for non-disabled and disabled alike. The concept of the internet is that it is free for all (some residents of China may beg to differ but I would suspect they can’t access this site anyway, so it may be a mute point). The internet is not the barrier. Poorly designed sites are the barrier. I’m not talking about the hobbyist web designer building his or her site on Springer Spaniels. It would be unfair to put the burden of accessibility upon the shoulders of someone who is probably struggling with HTML. No, the real culprits are those who know better but fail to act, to the detriment of their customer base and the internet population in general.
It’s nice to see that the latter are slowly but surely becoming the minority.
Get Paid For Blogging?
July 21st, 2007In my quest towards my first internet million, I’ve been tinkering with niche content sites and Google Adsense. Whilst doing this I decided to look into other income streams and, as a bit of a blogger, it naturally occurred to me to see whether I could get paid for blogging.
As I suspected, you can. Isn’t the internet a wonderful place? The service in question is called Smorty and once you sign up you are provided with a number of paid opportunities to blog about things which interest you. Smorty is very slick, with a nice interface. Having signed up to other paid blogging sites in the last few days, Smorty rates up there highly with all of the other paid blogging services and there were three opportunities waiting for me as soon as I had signed up. Nice work.
Whether writing a blog for money is a long term viable income stream or not only time will tell. In the meantime, if you fancy making a bit of cash then sign up for Smorty.
Ecommerce in a box
July 21st, 2007One thing which many of my clients require is an online shopping cart. When they ask for this functionality I am usually caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Ecommerce software is expensive and usually difficult to skin or configure. Free ecommerce software is available but the functionality is usually limited and the styles are again difficult to alter and it becomes uneconomical from my perspective to spend hours tweaking the UI.
As such, I was interested to be asked to review Ashop Commerce, shopping cart software produced by an Australian ecommerce software provider. At first glance, Ashop is like many other large players in the ecommerce software market. However with its web interface, it combines the flexibility of updating products and prices from anywhere you like via your web browser with the reliability you would expect from a major software house.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any clients in Australia. If I did however, I’d consider recommending that they try this software first, rather than getting a designer like myself to build a cart. You may think that this would be doing myself out of business, but it is always my belief that if a product is good and benefits the client then I will recommend it. I find that this builds a lot of trust with clients who may then come to you for other pieces of work.
Ashop seems to have all of the major bases covered, right down to the (usually) highly annoying task of creating thumbnails for product images. Some software requires you to do this manually and can have you tearing your hair out. Good luck to them I say. To any Australian visitors to the site, I say take a look at Ashop Commerce ecommerce software.
