I'm Simon, I like to design & build websites.

Busy times and Interlopers re-write

Recently I have been a bit short of work. It happens to every freelancer but after my last stint at de-construct I had nothing booked up and went on the search for work.

I did my usual gig searching and advertising stint using the very useful Gumtree website which has really picked up in popularity recently. If you’re opening Gumtree right now and preparing to offer clients “website packages” for £50 or something then please go swallow a knife, thanks.

Anyway… I barely received any responses and the ones that did ask for a quote decided to run for the hills when they heard my quotes (which aren’t expensive really). I knew I had two weeks work booked at SAS Design (just started this last week) but at the time that was two weeks away so I decided to make use of my time and learn Wordpress themes.

So far that has been a rewarding experience and although not as simple as ExpressionEngine it certainly allows me to offer a cheaper CMS and the admin area rocks.

Literally as soon as I started at SAS I’ve had a flurry of emails and quote requests dropping into my inbox. So much so that I’ve got two other projects now on the go and the highly likely chance I’ll be booked up on another one at the start of June (I met about that at lunch today in fact, god bless Pret as a meeting place). Not only that but I’ve still got at least two other projects to try and quote (HINT: don’t send me a sentence about your project, it’s very difficult to gauge)

So, I’m majorly busy but that’s great, I hope I can keep it that way. Don’t be scared to contact me for project work though, we can always work around deadlines!

Improving Interlopers

As well as all this I’ve just started the huge task of re-writing all the front-end code for Interlopers.

The need for this came from a couple of things, namely that the HTML & CSS was written quite some time ago and can certainly be improved but also because I wanted to tweak the site somewhat, like increasing the width for example.

Also IE6 usage on Interlopers has dropped to a joyous 2.5% so this re-write will be dropping that crappy browser completely which allows really efficient HTML and better CSS.

Back before I put a message up advising IE6 users to upgrade, the site stats showed 6% usage so I like to think that has had a positive effect in educating those users. Hopefully I can get it to 1% or so after the re-write.

Okay, I better stop typing as I’ve got plenty to do. Thank god for Lucozade and Red Bull!

Posted on Monday, May 18th 2009 and there is 1 comment

Categories: General, Web Stuff

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