Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

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Inspration Required.

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

Work has been going pretty well lately, it’s proving to be a bit difficult on my inspiration though. I have the stamina to complete the tasks I have, there’s no question about that. The issue is where I’m unable to come up with ANYTHING for the new clients coming in that hasn’t been done before. I know there are some very creative people out there but it’s one of those situations where once you’ve seen it done before, you know it’s wrong to go out of your way to recreate it and then pass it off as your own. Of course, there is an exception to the rule. If a client asks you to recreate a template that they liked (paid or free, or just on someone else’s website) then you have to do what the client wants – without breaking any major copyright laws at the same time.

I’m working on this new site that’s health related. With the way the client approached me I thought I was going to be working on a hospitals website or something. The money from it is great, don’t get me wrong, but I was going in a completely different direction when he told me to slow down and sent me a long email on exactly what the company was. It’s for a new experimental weight loss supplement, something I’m honestly not sure I would try myself, but they seem pretty darn focused on getting it launched and out there for the world to see so of course I need to come up with something that’s not only informative, but matches their brand label and can appeal to 18-32 year old men and women whom would benefit from using their product.

So what did I do? I went out of my way to look at just about every single site that houses a large database of website templates that I could find. During my search I went through the usual sites, ones that tend to pop into your head as soon as you’re looking for new ideas.  Fortunately, I found a new one that’s certainly worth flipping through, that’s for sure.  It’s called DreamTemplates.com.  They have a database of over 300 templates that are completely free, or you can pay them a one-time-fee of $59.95 and gain access to THOUSANDS of templates.

When looking through the premium templates, I have to say that I was certainly inspired.  While the bulk of them look very generic (to me at least) the rest of them are appealing and worth that one-time payment.  They’re all high quality templates, all of the sources files are included (if you’re looking at any Flash based ones) and they’re relatively attractive for just about any business or personal site you’re looking to house them on.  I’d highly recommend them.

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Posted in AGn Designs, Graphics Design, SR, Web Design | 5 Comments »

Happy August

Friday, August 1st, 2008

While it’s only about 1:30 in the morning, it’s officially August.  July went by rather quickly.  I’m still in New York, I’m still searching for a job and I’m still working on straightening out my head so I can figure out exactly what I’m going to do with my life.  Numerous family members are sick, and while Sean and I have been at my father’s house this entire time, my father doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that we’ve both been here for as long as we have.  We’re hoping to figure things out as soon as possible but of course that requires some kind of a call-back from any of the positions I’ve applied for.

Today was pretty busy for me.  I put in a lot of applications and I spent about six hours (straight – no breaks) working on an account for a client.  I want to get everything accomplished with them over the course of the next few days so I can begin putting the finishing touches on things – mainly because right now I’m in the process of converting screen shots to code, it’s time consuming but I’ve half-assed a few things here and there just to get it done.  The finalization of things will look much better, it’s just a matter of changing some CSS attributes around so there’s a better flow with the template.  Right now it looks very pasted together, but the cosmetics aren’t the hard part it’s the conversions.  I’m moving along nicely though so I’m sure I’ll be done sooner than I think.

I have a few pending projects as well.  I need to renew this domain name so any money that shoots into Paypal over the course of the next couple of days will go right to that.  I’m also still working on loading everything to the new AGn Solutions database, it’s all automated but it’s the matter of getting my older clients worked into the billing area.  Time consuming but worth it in the end.

In any event, guess I should wrap up for the night and head to sleep.  I’ve been up for about 15 hours now so it’s definitely time to crash.

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Posted in AGn Designs, Jobs, Web Design | 1 Comment »

It’s pretty nice…

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

For the past three days I’ve been working pretty hard on balancing a few different clients.  I’m happy to say that a few of my bids were accepted so this month is probably going to be pretty nice – money wise.  I can’t wait to dump all of the money into the bank account so I can visually see my going up to New York at the end of June being a definite possibility.  It’s been difficult though, it’s hard to juggle so many different ideas and attempt to remember which client they’re connected to.  If it weren’t for the Stickies with my iMac I probably would have everyone completely confused.  I also have to say THANK GOD for being able to choose multiple colors with the stickies.  Each client has their own color and it makes life very easy for me.

I’ve got a new Font database, there were a lot of fonts on my laptop that couldn’t be transferred over to the Mac.  Unfortunately they’re ones that I need to use on a regular basis with certain logos and what not so thankfully I was able to find the Mac version through a huge Google Search day.  Three of my favorites couldn’t be downloaded, but that’s only because I didn’t feel like paying for them again.  I did email the owners and request the alternate download considering I’d purchased them only recently.  So we’ll see how far that gets me.  For now I’ll work with what I have.

I’m patiently waiting on a fourth bid though, that would be the biggest money maker this month.  I hope to hear something before Friday but who knows what’s going to happen there.  Either way there’s still a lot of work left to do on the other accounts so I guess I’ll get back to them now.

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Upgrades

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Thanks to Fantastico finally being upgraded on the servers, I’m now using Wordpress 2.5.1.  It only took about 10 seconds to upgrade but that’s the beauty of auto-install programs.  With the upgrade came updates for about 20 of the 35+ plugins that this domain uses.  Thankfully everything is automatic there too so what I thought was going to be a daunting task of downloading all of the .ZIPs and then uploading manually – it was actually quite simple and only required the click of a mouse.  That’s always a good thing.

I’m in the process of updating my portfolio.  I have my resume updated but I need to get a few images pasted into my portfolio so hopefully I’ll be able to accomplish that sometime within the next hour or so.  I have to send out my resume to three different companies, hopefully at least one of them will actually give me something in return.  It’s my goal to make enough to have a new car by September, so I’ll cross my fingers there.

As far as this domain is concerned – I have a lot of articles to type up.  I’ve been product testing for the past couple of weeks and I have to say I absolutely love the new technology I’ve been introduced to.  I’ll have more on them later – I also intend to complete the PC Tips articles that I began writing a few weeks ago.  I know I’ve been slacking here but I have been busy with a lot of different projects and just work in general so naturally something was going to fall behind.  I’m working on getting back on track though.  Expect to see about 10 articles over the course of the next couple days.

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Outages

Monday, May 5th, 2008

With the recent beautiful weather, there was really no question as to when the storm was going to hit. The weather for the last week has gone to at least 10 degrees above the seasonal average so when it was followed by a string of storms I knew that something was going to suffer because of it. I’ve lost Internet three times in the past few days, it was 24-hours before I could get it back at one point and all Comcast had to say about it was “sorry – we can’t control the weather”. Now, I could understand if it was a nasty storm coming through but it was pretty mild in comparison to the ones that I’m used to. I put up a fight and I’m still convinced that Optimum up in New York is a hell of a lot better than Comcast, hands down. Yes, they’re both part of Time Warner but I guess it really depends on where the lines are.

So since the cable was out I was limited as to what I could accomplish. I did manage to get a lot of work done off-line but it’s hard to test things when scripts are being called from Internet based servers and I (at that moment in time) didn’t have a copy of them backed up to my computer yet. I’m convinced that I’ll eventually go out of my way to setup an in-house server but when the cable goes out you can’t access the internal network either so I should probably setup some kind of server software on my laptop. I’m sure I could do it with partitions but I guess I’ll know for sure when something like this comes up again.

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Busy Bee

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

I know I’ve been slacking off here, but when you’re bogged down with multiple clients and finally beginning to get somewhere with your business – the blogging aspect of things really doesn’t matter too much.  Well, it’s not that it doesn’t matter but it certainly doesn’t take first priority either.  I do like having an emotional outlet but lately I’ve put that into my private journal.  Which any tech-nerd would despise because it’s hand written.  It’s not based on some funky blog script heh.

My new contract position is working out pretty nicely.  It’s given me the ability to expand beyond the weblog template world so I can prove that I do actually know a thing or two about graphics design.  It feels as though something has shifted and the dark cloud hovering over me has now made it’s way out of town.

Even though I’ve been pulling 12 hour days, I still have the time (and the energy) to get all of my work done both online and offline.  I can still keep up on my daily routine (chores – so to speak) and I’ve spent quite a bit of time down on the beach to keep feeding my inspiration.  I also use this as my time to exercise.  So yes, I’ve not only kept myself busy but I’ve kept myself on my diet as well.  Isn’t that just fantastic?

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Posted in AGn Designs, Health & Beauty, Web Design | 1 Comment »

Looking Up!

Friday, April 11th, 2008

I’ve been pretty productive today. I’m now a member of a new design company on a contract basis and based on how things have been going so far, I have to say that I’m feeling pretty confident that my time with this company will be well spent. A previous company that I out-sourced for wound up screwing me out of not only money but valuable time that I could have spent somewhere else. It’s a shame that I had to deal with that for so long but it’s another thing to add to my portfolio because I have to admit that a lot of the things I did for the company turned out very nicely. I also gained quite a few business contacts as well, so that should hopefully work out well for me in the end.

I haven’t been floating around on G.A.F. as much as I used to. I’m sure there are a few thousand projects there that would bring in some decent money for me but I’m not going to force it. I’m going to see what this current company has to offer me and then I’ll just take it from there. I’m really excited to work with them, I applied on a whim just trying to get my name out there and within about a week I was filling out paperwork and contract agreements with them. I was surprised that everything went so smoothly when my email decided to cooperate with me. Now I’m just happy with the situation in general.

Sean is doing very well too right now. For the past couple of years he’s been working on a social networking site that’s supposed to trump MySpace as far as features go. He’s in the process of putting the final touches on things and hopefully they’ll be launching the site sometime within the next couple of weeks. He was just accepted as a tester and plug-in programmer for another company that’s the #1 provider of an out-of-the-box Social Networking script as well. And to add even more to his busy life, Jackie has thrown some eCommerce work his way for a custom script as well.

So as of right now, it’s pretty safe to say that Sean and I are going to have a pretty busy summer. It’s certainly something to look forward to. And while I’m sure that the Interview I went on a few weeks ago won’t work out for me, I’m confident that working at home together won’t be that bad. We’ll both be busy and money is going to come in pretty well for us so that’ll keep us off of each other’s nerves. I know before I can really do any work on the Mac I’m going to have to buy a new desk chair. When it comes to the graphics design aspect of things, I know it’d be easier to work on that, but when the chair is so horrible it’s impossible to sit for longer than 10 minutes, it’s not worth the effort. Hopefully in a few weeks time I’ll have enough money to get myself a new chair and really start appreciating the Mac for everything it has to offer me.

One can only hope, right?

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Still working on things…

Monday, March 24th, 2008

I’m working on getting a lot of my Social Site Widgets up and running.  I’m a member of quite a few different ones, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, Twitter, and a few blogrolls that I’ve joined and unfortunately forgot about, so I’ll be adding a new links section to the site as well.  I don’t really like putting really long content onto the sidebar so I’m sure I’ll figure something out.  Right now I’m in the process of merging my blogcatalog account, I didn’t realize that I had acidgloss.net previously listed with another email address.  I went to add it to my new account and was having some trouble.  Thankfully after an email from Daniel at BlogCatalog.com support, I’m hoping to be able to accomplish this merge.  I don’t have anything else going on with that other account so hopefully I can delete it completely.  I now know what my login info is, I had to go through seven email addresses to figure it out but I did it.  I’ll see what I can do about closing the account.

I’m trying to go to bed but that doesn’t look as though it’s going to happen anytime soon.  I’ll have to set the alarm for tomorrow morning so I can get myself up early enough in anticipation that I’ll actually hear something from the interview the other day.  Monday is a new business day and hopefully they want to include me in theirs!

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Almost There!

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

For the past couple of days I’ve been working on a new template for AGn Designs.  For me it’s finally the ultimate way of getting my portfolio and my blog merged together in a way that hasn’t been done before.  I’ve been meaning to do something like this for quite some time but I’ve been unable to due to a lack of confidence in my coding abilities I guess.  Either way I have everything drawn out and plenty of new features to work into it.  It’s going to take me a little while to finish configuring everything but I have to say that I’m really, really happy about it.  Lets just hope it turns out as well as it’s supposed to.

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Talk about upgrade!

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

I’ve been slacking off, I know!

(more…)

Posted in AGn Designs, Graphics Design, Web Design | No Comments »

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