This project came to me after an existing client recommended me to the owners of Pond House. They already had a website, but it was looking tired and outdated, it definitely needed a redesign.

After meeting with Brenda, the owner I got to work on designing the layout. The feedback from the meeting to give the website a fresh look, and to reflect the tone of the copy – which was friendly and inviting. I used warm colours – reds and creams, and slightly rotated the photographs used on the site to move away from looking too clinical.

I built the website using Wordpress, Brenda wanted to make small changes to the copy on the website in the future, so having Wordpress’s CMS already in place was a great reason for using it. Other decisions for choosing Wordpress were for it’s excellent SEO capabilities, and the ability to add additional functionality if and when the client needs. At present the website is built with static pages, with the only plugins being used are All In One SEO Pack, Google Analytics for Wordpress, Google Sitemap Generator and Contact Form 7 for the email form.

View the website here; http://earlshallfarm.info

The default search on Wordpress wasn’t going to be suitable for the product search I wanted to implement on Worm Sign T-Shirts. On the default theme, standard search will give you a results page that contains the pages and posts that were found as a clickable title and excerpt – a text only sample of the the pages content. This wasn’t going to good enough for a T-Shirt store.

Using 2 plugins I was able to define the pages and posts I wanted to be included in the search, as well as pages and posts that I didn’t want to be included, and to include an image from the product page as the main focus of the search results.

Search Unleashed gives you options for what content is searched. Rather than stating what could be searched, I selected what was to be excluded from the search results; all posts from the blog, as well as Home, FAQ’s and Contact page – this just left the T-Shirt pages, giving me a product search. Although one that would just give me the text from the pages and no images, not quite there yet.

Get The Image scans a page or post with the Wordpress loop and extracts an image – the plugin has a number of options for styling, as well as options for what image to grab from the post; one that is automatically extracted, or one decided by a custom field. Here’s the code that sits inside the loop;

<div id=wsthumbnail”>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">
<?php get_the_image( array( ‘image_scan’ => true ) ); ?></a><br>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
</div>

The options for Get The Image plugin sit in an array, you can add as many or as few as you want. I’ve just simply added an image scan to pull the first image it finds from the page, the image is already the correct size for the results page and will be styled within it’s containing div layer.

…while working with people you know.

We’ve all designed and built websites for people we know, mate’s rates don’t just apply to the building trade, and they shouldn’t. Helping a friend get their business online with a website can be very rewarding – they might have recommended you before, but now they have experience of working with you along with the results from their new website to back up their recommendation. You should also get to hear about how well the website is doing more often too – friends will often call to chat about their website, whereas some clients will only get in touch when they need something.

I have just recently finished a website redesign for a local driving instructor, he actually taught me to drive 6 years ago and lives opposite my parents – so I’ve known him quite a while.

For the purpose of this article, let’s call him Mr X. Original I know.

Mr X has contacted me a couple of times in the past asking how he can get his website on to the first page Google, and to get more traffic on to his site; advise that I have been happy to share. The website he originally had wasn’t very good, and could of been improved in a number of areas. Finally Mr X came to me asking if I would work on his website, I discussed with him and stated that the best thing to do would be for me to redesign the website and start from scratch. The price was agreed, and I started work.

Here was the first problem. We verbally agreed the brief and the price – nothing was written down. At the time I didn’t think I had anything to worry about, we were both happy with what was being done and the price I was going to charge. I also didn’t invoice for the usual 20% at the start of the project either – it was a very quick and relatively small project, it’s not like Mr X could disappear, I knew where he lived.

The project was finished quickly, and sign off was achieved after Mr X visited and looked through the website. I emailed over my invoice and expected a quick turnaround on payment. What I did get was a phone call and a confused Mr X wondering why my invoice wasn’t what was agreed. The discussion went around in circles, I was adamant that the invoice was correct, that it already included a “mates rate” style discount. I also apologised for not putting the quote in writing. I finally agreed to trim the invoice down by 10%. I was also asked to provide username and password details so they could manage and update the website content themselves – this wasn’t actually part of the original brief, but as the site was built in Wordpress, there was no problem with setting this up.

A few days later, the goal posts moved again. I received an email asked for the domains to be transferred, the website to be exported so it could be moved to a new hosting company (I was currently hosting it) and for me to explain the theme I designed and how to modify it in the future. I was a little annoyed at this new request so late in the project, but agreed to do so after the invoice was paid. And that was the problem. Mr X only wanted to pay my invoice after I transferred the website, I explained this wasn’t how I worked and that I was treating him like any other client. I also had suspicions of more delaying tactics were on the cards even after I made the transfer, in which case I had no way of taking down the website if payment wasn’t received. Mr X insisted that he would pay as soon as the website was transferred, but I refused. If he hadn’t of made an issue over the invoice initially, then maybe I could of trusted him to pay.

It’s a shame that the project has been taken down, I was looking forward to checking the analytics and seeing the website improve over time, as well as working on the site again in the future. It’s also a shame that our relationship has also been taken down by this project – a project that Mr X said he no longer cared about and wished he never asked me to do.

This project, like all others, has taught me a few things.

• Discounts are fine, but be realistic in pricing. Don’t give the project away, if your friend doesn’t like your quote – then walk away.
• Ask for a deposit at the start. State it’s needed for initial costs – purchase of domain names, hosting etc, rather than saying it’s just incase we have a falling out and I don’t want to lose out completely.
• Make sure the brief is in writing – even if it’s just an email listing what’s required and expected. As long as it can be referred back to later.
• Stick to your terms of business as closely as possible, even when asking for payment.
• Try not to do anything that will ruin your friendship.

The advise works both ways too. If you are employing a friend to work on your website (or any other project), then understand it’s not necessarily a favour and your friend is running a business, so try to treat it as business arrangement; with the added bonus of liking the person you’re working with.

Towards the end of March 2009 I launched a little pet project, a T-Shirt store designed to give me a little extra income each month. Over the next month I’m going to post a handful of blog articles describing what I’ve learnt while running Worm Sign T-Shirts, including working with Wordpress and it’s various plugins, use of copy and content, and using social networking to help promote the store.

A Little Introduction
Worm Sign combines two of my passions, music and T-Shirts. This has been one of the most important factors, having enthusiasm for the product and the community in which Worm Sign sits has enabled me to enjoy working on the project when the pay-off hasn’t always been equal to the work I put in.

The website was launched with a small collection of T-Shirts, fairly simple designs at first – but as time has gone on, the designs have improved – and so have sales. I’ve changed the layout on the website twice, and continuously tweaked and adjusted it. A product search was added late in 2009, as well as a chunky footer showing off all our blog posts, social sites and friends. We even changed the supplier of our T-Shirts halfway through last year too.

The website has evolved, and it’s been great to know that I can play with the website to my heart’s content. Something I would never get the chance to do on a client website.

This is the artwork for my latest DJ mix, Deep Down Inside.

This mix was a lot darker than my previous summer mix so I wanted to reflect that in the artwork. I only used 3 pieces of stock imagery for this, the Clown, the border and the paint brush splash as a holder for the text mix description. I added noise as well as an overlay to add contrast and a rough, dishevelled style to the clown that would match the font choice and borders.

I was recently asked to design an invitation flyer for a friend’s 30th birthday. Now, I don’t advertise the fact that I can design paper based products as well as websites so I don’t really get the opportunity to do them that often, so I really enjoy these jobs when the present themselves.

I am tempted to start offering this as a service on my website, initially small print jobs such as flyers, invitations and posters.

I’ve just recently finished a project for an artist client, Caroline Newton , who wanted a website to sell her prints and greeting cards, as well as advertise up and coming exhibitions. The brief was fairly straight forward, to produce a clean, simple website that Caroline could update and add to. Easy to manage content and a simple flow through the site for her visitors were the main requirements.

The website was built using CSS and PHP with MySQL handling all the content. I use Dreamweaver to produce a template to keep all the layout consistant, and take advantage of Dreamweaver’s Server Behaviours to make light work of inserting php functions. I also built a simple CMS so Caroline to edit the content add new products to sell, again taking advantage of Dreamweaver’s Server Behaviours to insert, update and delete rows from a MySQL database.

For the first time in a while I decided to print up some labels and cover notes for the latest DJ mix I’ve put together [Summer 2009 by Martin Lucas]. Being a summery house mix I wanted the cover artwork to continue the vibe.

I started off with a sunset photograph from stock.xchng, and proceeded to add layers in Photoshop for the illustrative parts. I also used a flat black coloured layer over the original photograph and set this to a 25% overlay in the layer opacity options – this boosts the contrast and saturation, burning out whites, strengthening colours and darkening blacks. I used non-descriptive curls and swirls to fill in empty areas of the photograph, a banner – again from stock.xchng to use as a place holder for the descriptive text and finally a handful of butterflies and stars in the foreground to bring additional focus to the summer. The image wraps around half of the back of the sleeve, then fades into black to give a background for the tracklist and my contact details.

Over the last few months I’ve tried to be scammed on a number of occasions, all I’ve done to invite them is to have a website promoting my freelance website design services, use ebay to auction an ipod touch and place an advert on autotrader to sell a car. Apart from my own website, the other two events are very regular actions undertaken by thousands of people every day.

Fake Cheques To A Freelancer
I was contacted by email via the form on my website from a guy saying he had a client – a car sales company – that wanted a simple, static website – a brochure style website consisting of about 5 / 6 pages. Nothing too technical or time consuming. So I emailed back my quote and a brief outline of how I work and what I needed from his client. The quote was accepted, along with the promise of the content being sorted out very soon. We exchanged contact and address details, and I agreed to start work once I have the initial content through.

What I got through next was a cheque, for £2,000. This was about 5 times the amount that I quoted for the job Рalso, the cheque came from a company called Blue Square who are a recruitment company based in Bedfordshire. Initially I did not connect the cheque with the car sales job РI contacted Blue Square to find out why I had been sent this cheque as I had had no previous dealings with them. Blue Square asked me to send it to their head office, a few days later I received a letter from them confirming the cheque was fake and thanking me for sending it to them.

In the meantime I received an email, asking if I had received the cheque yet – I replied no, curious as to what would happen. I also mentioned that I do not invoice for the full amount at the beginning of the project. A few days later I got another cheque in the post, this time from the Bank of Ireland and again for ¬£2,000. This time I took it to the police, who confirmed it was a fake – but were unwilling to take it any further as no fraud had taken place because I hadn’t done any work so there was nothing to be charged for.

Next, I got a phone call asking whether I had received the check from his client – it was from a mobile phone and the line wasn’t very good. I said that I had received the cheque, but it was fake. I asked if he knew his client was sending fake cheques – he hung up.

What they wanted was for me to try and deposit the cheque and send them back the balance from my own account in cleared funds – the cheque they had sent would of bounced and I would of lost about ¬£1,500. The whole affair was very suspicious, the cheques for too much money, being posted from South London and the South of France, no compliment slip or letter included with the cheques and the poor grammar used in the emails. I’ve since spoken to an artist client who had a similar scam – but in her case the buyer wanted an original piece of artwork posted, after sending a fake cheque for 3 / 4 times the quoted amount.

Designing flyers, leaflets, postcards and business cards can be a risky business – a single typo, missed by the designer and the client signing it off goes to print, suddenly you have 10,000 business cards that are completely unusable – they have to be reprinted with the cost that comes along with it. Even worse – the client could of started to give out the Business Cards to their customers – who could of spotted the typo, and as a result their first impression may not be positive.

Now, online – a website is designed, built and uploaded to the world wide web. A typo is spotted after being published – within a couple of minutes it can be amended, saved and republished with little cost and hardly any time taken. Now, some initial visitors may have seen the initial typo, but since the update all visitors will see the correct spelling and those early visitors who come back to the website will see the amended version.