Solo Technology

Project 1:
My brother in SD referred a new client to me a few weeks back. We’ve exchanged a few emails and I’ve begun to build them a relatively straight-forward “brochure-ware” web site. Doing business in the e-world is pretty wild! Can you imagine, say 15 years ago, engaging a consultant and planning a project just via email? No phones, no face to face. I’ve done that a lot in the last few years and it still feels “futuristic” to me at times.

As there is a possibility that the client may want to manage content on this site down the road I’m doing it with a template (CSS based!) from Pixelmill and good ol’ Frontpage 2003.

Why a template? Well, mainly because I can readily admit that I am definitely not a graphical designer. Just not my strength. And frankly, for what a decent template costs, it saves the client hundreds of dollars as opposed to what it would take me to come up with something similar. A nice jump start to the project. Perhaps if I ever standardize on a “design philosophy” down the road that won’t matter, but currently it does (and if it doesn’t matter, I bet my rates go up!)

Why Frontpage? Maybe it isn’t my favorite editor, but it is still quite serviceable. And, if someone who is not a “web guy” wants to be able to easily make content changes to a site I’ve built, it’s reasonably easy to teach them how to make that happen.

Project 2:
I mentioned last week that I’d attended a Microsoft show. And I mentioned that at that show, I learned about the free Visual Studio Express tools. As another web project, I’ve been messing around an hour or so each night trying to wrap my head around building a .net 2.0 site with Visual Web Developer (vwd). I’ve played with it enough to know that I really want to like the tool. But I’m ignorant enough to realize that I’m not sure it will be teaching me any bad habits. I’m truly a newb to the .net world… My current home page is long overdue to be rebuilt, so we’ll see how this goes.

I’ve found some really nice .css layout templates and, among other challenges, I’ll try to figure out how to use those within vwd. VERY fuzzy on exactly how that works at this point, but as part of the (free) registration I was sent a link to what appears to be a decent e-book and I’m plugging through it.

Project 3:
I’ve mentioned this a few times recently, but I not only want to redo my main pages, I also want this blog to match them. I think, however, I’ll table that until we see how Project 2 turns out.

Project 4:
Just to keep things confusing, I also want to check out nvu, an open-source “web authoring system.” I’ve read some good stuff about it but never seem to find the time to give it a look.

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