I'm still here...

Well it's been a while since I last posted, so I thought I would do an update. There's been a bit going on lately. Ballarat is going through a rather long stretch of hot weather, with most days sitting well above 30 degrees celsius, and the nights staying in the teens. It also makes for some good summer thunderstorms put it that way. Their was a spectacular lightning display a few nights ago that went on for several hours. Unfortunately for all the stormy weather we've had, it still isn't bringing much rain - and that's what this part of Victoria needs badly.

Business wise, my partner is in the process of starting her own small business (more to come on that down the track), as it's only early days still. I've been spending my spare time learning the Joomla content management system and tweaking out a site for her in the meantime though.

I had been using OsCommerce for some time, but had heard great things about Joomla on several of the forums I visit, so I decided to give it a go, and it has proved to be well worth the input.Of the two open source cms's I'm definitely leaning towards Joomla now as my favourite as it is just so easy to achieve the right look you are after. It is a well set out little program.

I also have to to say it is much easier to go about developing a website for a client when they can sit right next to you and discuss what they want, and not have to do it all via the phone or email.

I also have several other designs on the go for various clients around the country, which are all developing at a steady pace. You will see more of these as they take shape in future posts.

Margaret Dennis has new look

The recent weeks at Shaken Designz have been rather fruitful. Apart from working on the link campagins for Barry's Antiques of late, i've also been busy working on an upgrade to Margaret Dennis's website to prepare it a little for the search engine optimisation the website will be receiving shortly. I wasn't totally happy with the way the website looked (i'd taken over management late last year) after I'd done a little bit of work updating it initially. Margaret wanted her gig guide updated for the new year, so now was the perfect time to give it a bit of a facelift. I've gone through the entire site and made it conform to W3C recommendations and it now has clean and error free css and xhtml coding throughout. I've added a sitemap and disclaimer, and also made the body text and hyperlinks much more readable, and introduced a slightly different layout to the pages and gave it some better formatting. Overall, the site looks much more professional now than it ever was, and I have a very happy client as a result. It also means less work for me once the optimising side of it gets underway, now that the site looks and operates more efficiently.