I’m starting to realize that I have a marketable trade. It isn’t a new skill of mine, but it is one that I’m just now starting to exploit. It is, of course, web design. I don’t fancy myself much of a designer, and I have no graphical skills to speak of, but I know what makes a good website, and I know my way around WordPress. I have recently, or am still in the process of, bartering redesigned websites for a wood stove, music (concerts and songs), and a custom hood ornament. I get the feeling this is only the beginning. It’s easy for me to do, and make a huge impact on the people I do it for. I’m making sure I pace myself – I don’t want to kill my love of it and turn it into a job.
Tag: web development
Designer
Apparently I’m a web designer now. I guess it’s not really a new thing, it’s all over my resume – designed and built the website, designed and built the website, etc. It’s something I always seem to end up doing, in part because I’m asked, in part because I volunteer, but mostly because web designers charge so damn much. I’m not a good web designer, as proud as I am of my website I can’t claim that. Regardless, it seems like I’m doing it more and more. I made the website for Nishi’s business, which she has started up again, and I made a redesign for Connecticut BioFuels, though it’s unclear if/when it will be implemented. Now I’m involved in a start-up of a friend of mine, and it looks like I’m their man on the web. I’m not complaining, I just find it funny that I keep drifting towards something I consciously avoided.
I have no desire to be a web designer and nothing else. It isn’t a full time job that would work for me. I don’t think I have a good aesthetic eye, for one, and I’ve never been especially handy with graphic design. I love the initial part of designing a website, planning and troubleshooting. The fine-tuning bugs me a bit more, often because it consists of a thousand tiny changes that I largely disagree with. I think to really make a good website you need to be both involved in the project and tweak it as it is used. Being a professional web designer precludes all of that. But I’m not a web designer, and shouldn’t be looked at as an authority about what makes a good website. In that way I’m thankful for the middle road I’ve paved.
Almost Legit
After that server move, some stuff on the Landshark site got messed up, and I only just got around to fixing it. I almost went and recoded the site before I figured out the problem was simple enough to fix. That site really is a piece of crap, and someday I’m going to have to rewrite it. I’m not looking forward to that.
I finally installed Apache locally, so I can play around with things offline. This is seriously something I should have done years ago, but never did. Though I bookmarked MAMP, I went with xampp. I’m pretty sure MAMP is just a downstream version of xampp, except that they changed it enough that it performed significantly worse on my system. Whatever the case, I’m now almost legitimate. I’m still a pretty casual coder, but this might actually take me to the next level.