2008 / 2009 overview

Posted January 2nd, 2009 in Miscellaneous Postings

Out with the old and in with the new... 2008 was an interesting year for me as I changed tack a couple of times in the work I do and the year coming up should be much more interesting and fulfilling.

I started off 2008 working, among other things, on supporting the JK Kids website and then building a new version to replace the difficult to maintain old version, and to make it easier for customers to use the website. I covered what the website used to look like and some of the issues we faced and then later what it looked like when we relaunched the site. We added a nifty zoom in function a little later using jQuery to make it easier to view products.

The JK Kids redevelopment took a lot longer than expected and I decided I needed to change to working more or less full time for a small number of customers. So from August I worked for JK Kids 2 days a week, Personalised Plates 1 day a week, and another customer 2 days a week. I also managed to more or less give the few other customers away.

During this time I made some major changes to the Personalised Plates website. Most of the changes were in the code behind the background, but the way a person enquires on a plate has been changed quite significantly to make it clearer they can choose designs for the background. You can read about this here.

By October, I'd realised that although this was making me some good money I'm really tired of developing websites and creating value for other people and not for myself. For a long time I've had some good ideas for websites that I'm sure can make me some money, some of which I've been wanting to do since 2003.

I decided it was time to bite the bullet and set some of these up and see how I go. So I found a replacement for me at JK Kids (it took a while and I'm still supporting my replacement a little bit each week) and tidied up some loose ends.

From this month I'll be doing a small bit of work for some customers but most of my time will be concentrated on creating these new websites and in the next 4 to 12 weeks you'll see here in my case studies section the results of my efforts.

First up was the launch of my Electric Bookmarks website last month and on which I need to finish a few minor functions. That uses a new MVC-ORM framework I have created and which will enable me to really quickly and easily create new websites. This was the first new website of my own that I've launched for at least a couple of years and is the first that I've continued to update, even while I've been on holiday the last 10 days.

Next will be the relaunch of healthy.co.nz, a website I am in partnership with. I started working on this in December and we should have it ready to go live towards the end of January. This was originally designed and developed in 1998 and has a fixed width to fit within an 800x600 monitor! The new design is fluid and will stretch to the full width of the screen, and makes far better use of screen real estate. There are a number of other useful new features as well and this also uses my new framework.

Some other projects I'll then work on include my Running Calendar, Kidzstuff Web Directory, Price Comparison Search Engine and some other affiliate projects.

Of course, I'll be continuing to post on this blog at the rate of 1 post per day, and I aim to concentrate more on PHP, MySQL and jQuery rather than jumping all over the place like I do currently over a variety of topics. By doing this I think I'm more likely to grow my RSS subscriber base.

Well that's all for this post. May 2009 be a great year for me and for all of you out there.