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.
On my way to work I drive past a house, the owner currently has their car for sale – I’m not 100% sure what the car is because the only you get is that there is a sandwich board outside with 3 words chalked on;
“Car for Sale”
Now, I can’t imagine anybody driving past being enticed by this sign to find out more – the sign is making the assumption that someone is looking for a car, and the current owner has a possible answer for them. You can’t actually see what the car is – it’s parked down the driveway, partially hidden from sight.
In the offline world, and in this case specifically – facts are required. Car for sale could of been the title that lead into a bullet point list of facts and figures – what is the car, how many miles has it done, how old is it, what features does it have, and how much is it being sold for.
Now, online – as an initial statement, as a domain name – carforsale would be brilliant. Google – the most popular search engine with approximately an 80% market share uses the domain name as one of the most important matches to a user’s keyword search. Although, funnily enough – a Google UK search for “car for sale” does not bring up the carforsale.co.uk website – but this is probably because it’s not a website, just a holding page and has as much detail as the sandwich board!
I’ve been working with Wordpress more and more recently and have just launched one site built in this versatile content management system (wormsigntshirts.co.uk) with another on the way very soon.
When installing Wordpress I download and install a set of plugins that help extend Wordpresses capabilities and give me features that aren’t ‘out of the box’. Here’s my list of 9 essential plugins for Wordpress – the ones I use each and every time.
All In One SEO Pack
Add tags and descriptions to posts and pages to help with search engine optimisation.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack
Contact Form 7
A simple contact form, add any elements you want and give them a class so you can style them in a style sheet.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7
Really Simple CAPTCHA
Can be used in conjunction with the above contact form to add a little spam guard security,
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-simple-captcha
Feedstats
Statistics for your blog and RSS feed.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedstats-de
WP-DB-Backup
Make backups of your database tables and content, then email them to yourself – just encase the worse case scenario should happen to your blog or website.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup
Google XML Sitemaps
Another helpful SEO plugin that will automatically crawl your and compile a XML sitemap that can be tracked and submitted to Google, Ask, Yahoo and MSN.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator
Google Analytics for Wordpress
Track visitors on your website with this powerful analytics package – this Wordpress plugin makes installing the code within your website very simple.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Downloads and installs the latest version of Wordpress, very clever and very simple – it will also make backups along the way so there’s no chance of you loosing your content.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade
Sociable
Allow your visitors to submit your pages and blog posts to one of hundreds of social bookmark sharing websites – you can select the ones that you want on your website.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable
If you have any essential plugins that you use – suggest them in the comments box.
I recently purchased a Wordpress Theme that had a CSS style sheet that wasn’t arranged in a format that I’m used to – which made it a bit trickier to work with.
So I used Clean CSS which tidied up the CSS and rearranged it into a format that I’m used to, making it a lot easier to work with and edit. It only takes a couple of minutes to work through the code, you can either paste in your code or point the site to a file.
Have a go and find out more here; www.cleancss.com
A few months ago a wrote about having a passive income and choosing to design and hopefully sell some T-Shirts online. Well, the website is finished, and in the collection we have 12 T-Shirts with more hopefully added over the coming weeks and months; www.wormsigntshirts.co.uk.
The website was built in Wordpress, I used the eShop plugin for the ecommerce part of the site – I originally looked at using WP-ecommerce plugin, but it was over complicated for what we actually needed on the site. eShop gives you the option to add a ‘add to basket’ for a product on a page or post – very simple.
The T-Shirts are aimed towards DJ’s and music fans, and will continue along this path for the future. We’ve got a twitter account [twitter.com/wormsigntshirts] so you can follow us for updates, and news, and details of new design releases.
Oh, and how did we get the name Worm Sign? Well, it was after a conversation with a friend who received a strange / maybe alcohol infused text message from a boy stating that ‘we should all look out for the worm signs’. Indeed we should!
On the first weekend of the new f1 season the live coverage was on the BBC in the early hours of the morning, so wanting to watch the repeat the BBC’s iplayer was the option ahead; but I didn’t want to watch it on my 12″ PowerBook so I investigated whether watching it on our Nintendo Wii was a option… and it was.
The Wii’s browser of choice is Opera and has Flash already installed so no extra plugins or apps are needed (unlike the iPhone!). The BBC have also added a few extra features and options especially for the Wii along side a very nice set of FAQ’s which solved all my queries. This all lead to being able to watch the 3 hour Gran Prix on demand on our widescreen tv in our lounge.
The only real issue is that you need to purchase (with your wii points) the Internet Browser application via the Wii Shop, it costs about ¬£3.50 – I had already purchased and downloaded the application so it wasn’t a downside for me.
Find out more here; www.bbc.co.uk/blogs, and there’s a little demo of it all in action on youtube here.
