For a while now I’ve been debating whether or not to start a blog; I’ve been warned they can be time consuming, I’ve been warned they can be difficult to write, but something was just nagging away in my head saying: “Go on, you know you want to!”
Now I guess the challenge is what to talk about – but I think the best piece of advice I’ve had recently regarding blogging is to just be myself… so here I am!
As you may have read on my main site, I’m a freelance web designer who works during the day as an arts marketer, and owns/manages/plays in a string quartet at weekends, so as you can imagine life is pretty busy!
Web design is something I kind of fell into by accident but now I’ve started doing it, I really love it. There’s something quite satisfying about working on something that is so creative, yet so logical.
I’ve just recently finished a website for Ocean’s 3 – a rat pack vocal group based up in Aberdeen. It was the first time I had integrated a Facebook Fan Box into a site which is great as it allows the guys to update their Facebook status and website simultaneously. I’ll be updating my portfolio page shortly with a feature on the site.
I have a few of new web design projects in the pipeline; one for a drummer, some updates for existing clients, but the one which is most active at the moment is for a community interest company called Hear My Music. They provide music therapy for people with communication difficulties, including those who cannot use language as a communication method. They’re a relatively young company so it’s quite an exciting time to be involved in a project like this, when possibilities of how the website could help their company are still being realised mid-design process! We’re hoping to have that site live within the next few weeks…!
On the non-client side of things, I’ve had my nose to the proverbial grindstone recently learning some new programming languages. I’ve recently taken a couple of online courses with “professional know-it-all” web design guru Kevin Yank at SitePoint: PHP Live and JavaScript Live. First time I’ve ever tackled server-side scripting, but it’s really interesting stuff. Kevin’s courses were excellent and will hopefully go some way to helping me produce more interactive websites in future!
SitePoint have been really great recently in terms of encouraging people to expand their knowledge through these online courses – I’m also taking a refresher course in CSS with Russ Weakly at the moment – although it’s a language I’m very confident in, it’s always interesting to go back to basics and be reminded of some of the rather obscure things you can do with it!
So, a few projects on the go, a lot of learning on the go… it’s all good.
