To The Moon And Back

My client is into high yield investments. When he offered me the project, I have absolutely no idea what is it about. So I accepted it and gave the usual estimates. However, as the project progress, I realized a lot of things. One, it’s hard to find a web hosting company that accepts sites offering services like HYIP. And if you ever find one, you need to make sure that it’s totally secure and protected from DDoS attacks. The most likely candidate package would be VPS hosting or higher. Finding a hosting is part of my services so I was relieved to finally found one that assured they can protect the site from minor DDoS attacks (up to 500MB).

The other thing that I’ve read about HYIP is that owners are just stealing money from its investors. Now this bothered me because I wouldn’t want to be a part of something illegal. My client assured me that their investment process is legit, unlike those start up companies whose main goal is to stay afloat for six months to one year only. So now I’m still reading anything that I can about the competitors. I’ve actually learned so much stuff and I’d be lying if I say that I’m not the least bit tempted to invest.

Anyway, I’m thinking if I should pay extra for Cpanel web hosting? As I work on the design and configuration aspect, I’ve realized how hard it is to manage the VPS admin panel.

My design portfolio is so outdated that I rarely show it to my new clients. I’ve decided to come up with a design now while I’m free. And when I say now, it will probably take me more than two weeks to finalize the first mockup. I am after all, my worst critic.

The design however will be based on these brushes from Brusheezy.com

Wish me luck. I’m planning to create a special artwork as well so it will definitely take longer than one month. And that’s if I don’t slack off.

As an online worker, it’s important to be visible anywhere in the Web. Aside from social networking sites and freelancers community, you can also try promoting yourself or your business via Lookup page. Look up page helps professionals, individuals and businesses make their presence known around the World Wide Web. What’s great about this service is that Lookup page will market your page so it will have a high ranking on Google and other major search engines.

For all Lookuppage members, they can upload their professional online profiles for free. This page includes basic information about you, web links, photos, services that you offer and free web search ranking. If you want more features like reports, statistics, personalized domain, web hosting, etc. there are several paid options that you can choose from. From Standard Account at $2.99 a month to Business-Pro account at $19.99, you can totally take control of your online identity and maximize your online visibility.

I got a quote request for a new site development similar to this commercial real estate site. It’s a great project but I’m so fully booked my first thought was to decline it. Good thing that just before I clicked on the send button, I remembered to add that I’d be available on August. The client replied and he’s willing to wait because he’s planning to come home to the Philippines around that time as well. So on August, I’ll be meeting with two new international clients, the other one is a makeup artist who wants to put up her shop here. Things are really great, project-wise and I’m very satisfied with the number of leads I’m getting monthly.

I feel great today. Why? I just finished three design templates under two hours. This is a rare occurrence lately as I struggle each day to come up with new designs. My husband asked me last week if I feel like I’m getting tired of my job and I automatically said yes. For the past couple of months, I’ve done nothing but design websites. I was so swamped that I can’t even update my own portfolio site. Plus the clients that I’ve been dealing with somehow fall on the clients from hell category. It’s hard and the work that I fell in love with became just another dead end job.

Thankfully, a week of no design tasks pulled me out of my rut. I just needed a break. Now my creative juices are flowing nonstop that I accepted another two sideline projects. My long time client has also proposed if I want to be a part of his new company. He has been checking out the Nevada LLC Corporation because even though he’s based in Detroit, he plans on putting up a small business in Nevada. He asked if I’m willing to design one hundred websites for him as he begins the first phase of his business planning. I said I’ll have to think about it. My creative juices might be filled at the brim right now, but 100 websites will be the quickest way for it to run dry.

I received another call from my friend today and asked if I’ve already decided to pursue overseas work. I haven’t really thought about it even with so many options to choose from. The company where I telecommute just recently opened up a physical office in Chicago, and asked me if I see myself moving there in a year or so. I honestly don’t know. Aside from the fact that I can’t leave my daughter just yet, I’m still happy where I am that I don’t see any reason why I should move. But we’ll see what happens next year.

Just in case I accept the offer and find that I didn’t like it, there are tons of Chicago Web Site Design companies that I could check out. That’s the good thing in finding a job these days. You can spread your resumes all over the web in just a matter of few clicks. In fact, I’ve been receiving lots of design requests from potential clients who “found me” online. I’m starting to think that I can afford to go solo with all the side design projects landing on my lap. I’m just hesitant because nothing beats having a steady job and paycheck even if you don’t have a lot of projects.

If you need sideline projects, do check out: sitepoint.com,getafreelancer.com, guru.com, and the one that started it all, e-lance.com. I honestly believe you’d never run out of job online if you just know where to look.

My recent attempt to customize Boonex wasn’t exactly a success. Still, the experience was rewarding enough that I’m now more confident to try new applications.

Let me tell you a few things about Boonex.

It’s a free, open source software that lets you create dating sites, social networks, content sharing portals and more. It has the basic features every social networking site offers - forums, chats, profile pages, dating events, groups, classifieds, media galleries, blogs, articles. The first time I installed it, I was amazed by my ability to set up my very own social networking website. The wonders stopped there, though.

As a designer, I don’t think you’d encounter a lot of problems if your CSS coding skills range from good to excellent. The documentation is not yet available but there are several sites offering tutorials on how to install, customize, troubleshoot the Boonex app. For programmers though, the application is very problematic. The biggest problem that we had is that our client wanted to add several features that are not part of Boonex. Not only that, the said features needed to be delivered in two weeks time. Even if our programmer could handle these PHP customizations at a short amount of time, the Boonex issues started to make things slower than it already is. One minute the ‘Navigation Builder’ is working, the next minute it will stop loading the changes. The ‘Classifieds area’ won’t accept ads if you assign it to a Category without a Sub-category. The upload media worked on and off the first few days and stopped working completely on the last remaining weeks. There are so many bugs to mention and I will not list them all here. We tried to hire so-called Boonex experts but the guy that we contacted disappeared. We also talked to a few independent companies but it’s either they haven’t heard of Boonex or they just don’t want to touch it.

To cut the long story short, the project was discarded and we didn’t get paid. To think I’ve spent so many sleepless nights worrying about it. To give Boonex credit though, it was pretty easy to setup and use. Maybe if you use the standard features and try not to improve it, it will work just fine. But paying clients don’t waste money on standard features so if you want moolah, might as well go for Joomla. Now, that rhymes! I also heard about PHPizabi from this blog so feel free to explore that. I haven’t personally tried them but given my experience with Boonex, it’s always better to try and lose, than never try at all.

Still want to try? You might want to bookmark the following sites to help you get started
Boonex Website
Boonex Nerd
Expertzzz.com

Exactly June 12, 2007 when I received an email from my boss telling me that Safari is now available on Windows. Since I don’t have a mac, (see previous posts), I immediately downloaded the beta version with the hopes of being able to test my designs on Safari. To my disappointment, the browser crashed and won’t load anything else aside from apple.com. After that incident, I’ve totally forgotten about Safari.

After writing my post on how I want a MAC, I realized two things. One, there’s no possibility that I can get one in a couple of months and two, I can just search the net to see if there’s a tool that allows you to remotely browse on a mac platform. While searching for that tool, I came across the keywords ‘Safari on Windows‘. So I was like, WTF? Could this be true? I clicked the link and voila! I got a nice page with the headline Safari 3 Public Beta - The world’s best browser. Now on Windows too. Don’t you just love their taglines, btw?

I realized at that exact moment that I’ve already tried to download Safari before and it didn’t work. Still, with the needs of a poor designer who can’t afford a MAC just yet, I downloaded it again to see if something has changed.

Tons have changed. It’s fast, it’s wicked. The interface is very apple-ish, simple but full of punch. Even the starter page is amazing, full of javascripts and div coding to show you how efficient the browser is. I checked all my website designs and surpise, surprise, (well, not really) most of them are not working as it should. I’m not exactly pissed, I’m just bummed because I know I’d have to re-do and fix all of them. I mean, how great can you be if your coding will not work on the world’s best browser? Not very much, I’m afraid.

As a designer, I try to move away from printing projects because one, I don’t have a printer to see what the color looks like, and two, I’m just not comfortable working on huge banners or tarpaulins. But when a client asks for one, then do my best to deliver. The first thing that I ask is where they are planning to print it. Knowing which printing company is a huge deal because then I can get to their website and download one of their templates if they have any. Once I have the template, all I need to do is draw the designs that I have in mind using the specs provided. After that, it’s just a matter of approval and minor changes then the final work will be sent to the printing company. It’s now up to them to match the colors so it will look as nice. Plus I don’t have to worry about unnecessary details / steps (unless they pay me extra to handle it) like account setup, credit cards, deliveries, type of paper, etc.

I need to design a web site and a logo for our new hosting web site.

This is the theme.

Sweet!