A nice article with tips for improving the efficiency of front-end development.
Archive for July, 2009
I used this excellent paper texture tutorial this morning when I was working on a Western-themed web design.
I’ve used a number of other PhotoShop paper tutorials at one time or another…
This is an excellent torn paper edges tutorial, beautiful results and very simple but it’s also very time-consuming.
This fast torn paper edges tutorial uses a custom brush and is a lot quicker than the previous one.
Simple but effective weathered paper look.
Another very good-looking torn paper tutorial.
But what do you do with these textures next?
How to turn a texture into a seamless background to use it for a website or other large area.
As a web designer, I’m always looking for ways to help my clients (I know this somewhat contradicts my previous post where I’m trying to remove extraneous services…). About 3 1/2 years ago I started NOCO Hosting and became a reseller for XO, eventually moving all my customer accounts over to HostGator.
For the most part it’s been a profitable and nearly hands-off experience. I’ve been quite happy with HostGator’s tech support and services. My clients like it because they have someone who can talk to them in plain English when there’s a problem, and they don’t have to deal with setting up a hosting account with one of the big-box providers.
I like it because it’s so much easier for me to hop into WHMCS, create a new account, set up the account and upload the site than it is for me to jump through all the hoops required to get access, get FTP info, and deal with weird server configurations at the huge hosting shops, or, even worse, on someone’s basement server.
When something goes wrong, though… then I sometimes just want to run away.
A few months ago I had a rash of phishing hacks run through a few accounts on my server. As it stopped as quickly as it started, I strongly suspect it was a server security issue. Dealing with that occupied most of my time for a week, and when the rare problem does crop up it tends to be very time-consuming. This happens on average about 1-2 times per year (not phishing necessarily, but some issue or another that has to be resolved right away and affects all or most customers).
So I have a few options.
- Keep everything as is. NOCO Hosting runs as a separate website from Red Kite Creative, my web design business site, and anyone can sign up for an account there. This is good monetarily, but I don’t have enough non-client hosting customers to really make it necessary. It’s never taken off the way I hoped it would, even though I’m one of the only green hosting companies in my region; when I started I was sure that it would be very lucrative, but not so much.
- Create a new reseller account under Red Kite’s aegis and gradually move my hosting clients over. I’d stop operating as NOCO Hosting and only offer to host Red Kite clients, mostly for convenience sake for me and my design clients. I’d get rid of the NOCO website altogether.
- Totally drop hosting services as part of narrowing my overall business focus and charge more for the time it takes to assist clients with other hosts.
Any other web designers that offer reseller hosting services – what do you think? Is it profitable enough for you to stick with it? How often do you have large-scale problems pop up that make you think twice?
As a result of a recent post on Freelance Folder about increasing your income by narrowing your focus, I made some changes to both my website’s front page and my internal policies about the type of projects I’m going to accept.
My favorite jobs include gallery sites (photographers, artists, designers, architects, etc.), WordPress sites where I can do custom theming, and general design or redesign projects. I’m going to start concentrating on those types of clients and moving away from what I don’t enjoy doing – like the large e-commerce sites. I’d be happy if I never touched one of those again.
Not to say that I won’t do any e-commerce but from now on, it’ll be smaller product lines where I can use tools like FoxyCart, or medium-sized product lines where something customizable like E-commerce Templates or OptionCart works nicely. No more X-Cart or ZenCart; those are some of the most hairy apps I’ve ever seen as a web developer.
I’m using FoxyCart on two client sites right now, and while it did take some back-and-forth on the forums to get it working, I really like it and the clients do too.
One of the things that prompted this was a recent client who wanted a placeholder web page for her new business. She ‘loved’ what I did for her, then three days later had a meltdown about it and redesigned it in Word. She wound up paying me about $500 for a simple one-page placeholder because she didn’t know what she wanted.
I have no desire to do any more work for clients who give me designs to code for them, unless said client is a designer-type themselves. I like working with other web and graphic designers and am happy to code for them, but for general clients, I’ve decided that if you don’t trust me enough to use my design expertise, you shouldn’t be using Red Kite at all. I’m leaning into the design and front-end dev realm and away from so much back-end development work.
I’m at the point in my personal Joomla project where every time I go in there, I wind up with more questions than when I started that work session. Or I might go in thinking I’m going to quickly style this feature or add a module to that page, and wind up not only not figuring it out but having to go post on the forums to try to get some help. It’s coming together so well, yet I feel like I’m hiking in sand whenever I try to make a little more progress.
