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

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.

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.

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.

Rollip does one thing, and it does it very well. Taking your original photographs, it will transform them to authentic aged images – even surrounding them in a polaroid style border, then making them available to you to print and put them on your website.

As you can see from the results above, the filter has aged the image – de-saturating the colours and adding a certain amount of yellow to wash away the bright sky blues. It did take a couple of minutes to upload the image – which was about 6mb, and to create the result, but if your intentions are only to produce images for the web, then you could upload smaller images to begin with.

It’s very easy to use, and there are a number of options to play around with – I’d definitely recommend giving it a try here; www.rollip.com

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’ll watch and enjoy a range of films, from gritty thrillers to foreign cinema to ‘for the kids’ animation. During the last 9 months 3D films have been cropping up more and more at the local multiplex, Bolt, Monsters vs Aliens, Coraline and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs which has since gone on to be the highest grossing 3D film in the UK.

The film’s marketing companies shout the line of “3D is a better, more enjoyable cinema experience”, and they are correct in some cases, Coraline’s 3D was excellent and the best show case for the technology so far, it was immersive and added a great deal to the experience – it did improve an already very good film. Other films haven’t impressed as much, Bolt was good, but Monsters vs Aliens was pretty average and Ice Age 3’s 3D was hardly noticeable and pretty pointless.

Now, if you listen to the film studio owners – they will say that 3D is a technology brought in to help stop piracy. Reports suggest that 25% of potential revenue is lost due to film piracy – illegal downloads of films, and 90% of those have allegedly been filmed with a camcorder in a cinema. So to stop this, 3D films can’t be recorded with a camera – with a single lens camera and obviously one that isn’t able to wear a pair of 3D glasses, the result of trying to capture a 3D film this way is a blurry picture.

From these 2 points it all sounds very good – the cinema goers gets a better experience [albeit not always], and the film studios hopefully make more money, or at least they don’t loose some of the revenue that was previously lost to piracy.

Now, for the errors that have been made since the launch of 3D films, and this is mostly the fault of the actual cinemas.

Our cinema of choice is Cineworld in Ipswich, we have monthly cards allowing us to watch unlimited films for £13.50 each Рwhich is great. The price of a cinema ticket is about £7.00, so we only have to go twice in the space of a month for it to work out cheaper. Now, for 3D films they have been adding on an extra charge (£2.00 each, or £5.00 for a family ticket) Рnot to pay for the glasses, but for the extra cost that the cinema has had to make in buying the special 3D projectors it needs to show the films.

Following this, and I’m sure to appease their customers they have been putting on 2D versions of the films for people that don’t want to spend the extra on a 3D ticket. After the films I’ve seen I’m not fussed about seeing the 3D version and I’m certainly not going to spend an extra ¬£2.00 on seeing the 3D version. Now, if I’m not unique others will think the same and have possibly forced the hand of the cinema to put on the 2D versions. And of course, these 2D versions are able to be filmed by pirates.

This is evidence that 3D films are not drawing in the extra crowds. Surely if 3D films were doing their job they would create extra revenue and profit for the cinema, this extra revenue would cover the costs of the equipment upgrade and they wouldn’t need to be passed on to the customer. Or that the cinema is milking the excuse for extra revenue. I for one will only be watching the 2D versions in the future.

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

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.

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.