Taro's Trade launched

My latest website project has just been published... Taro's Trade - Online musical instruments...

A change of scenery

Well today I have some good new and some bad news.

The good news is that I have been offered a full time day job outside of my own business. I'll be a Sales Consultant/Assistant Manager for a growing company here in Ballarat.

The bad news is it means that Shaken Designz will be scaled back somewhat to cope with this new arrival. I'll still be operating my business as I have been for the last 3.5 years, as I enjoy it very much, but just in a smaller capacity from now on, only working in the evenings and on weekends, as the new job will take precedence over it as the main money earner. I'm still keeping my current client base, as well as doing new work when required by clients. For most, nothing will change as email is my usual form of contact for many of my clients. I look forward to continuing to grow my business and develop new client relationships in the mean time, and deliver the same level of service as I have been.

I begin work at the new job on the 23rd May. From then on my first point of contact will be email, and or my mobile phone if needed. I will respond to any inquiries as soon as possible then.

Google Page Rank Update

Well in Page Rank at least.

My site has jumped from a PR2 to a PR3. One of my client sites Barry's Antiques has also climbed to a PR3. It turns out Google did one of their quarterly page rank pushes over the weekend (saturday I think), and updated their databases, and well they now believe my site is better than it was before. Well, who am I to complain...

Next step....PR4 mwahahahahaha...

Technorati

I've just set up a new account on Technorati - check them out. Technorati is a website that links blogs, so you can find all your favourites in one place. Keep track of all your favourites.

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.

A day at the office...

Just thought i'd share an experience I had earlier today...

While researching link partners for a client, I came across a website (which I won't name), that was clearly in need of some help, both in design and optimising - they simply had a single, cluttered page with no real focus or real info about their business. Being an active searcher for new business, I contacted them via email with a short message, and offered my services to them if they were interested. Now I wasn't pushy about it or anything like that, just a simple offer of my time and expertise...

Ten minutes goes past, and I get an email response back from them (to which I was quite surprised), so I open it up, and start reading. The company, not only wasn't interested in my website design services, they occused me of spamming them, and reported my address as well. Nice isn't it... try and do something helpful for some people and what do you get for your troubles...

Now I personally hate spammers like anyone, but anyone in their right mind can tell the difference between a spam email, and a legitimate and honest email. If I get anyone legitimately offering their services to me (just like I did), then I simply send them a response back saying i'm not interested. Spammers however, just get blocked and deleted, not even acknowledged.

The thing that got me though...after they accused me of spamming, they actually responded to my message!

Err Hello...now if I was a spammer (which i'm not), that's not the smartest thing to do is it, as then i'd now have a legitimate address to actually spam as I knew it was actively checked. I wouldn't have minded getting no response at all, or even a message back saying 'no thanks', like I mentioned above, that's fine. I'd leave it at that and go on with more important things. The person at the other end clearly wasn't the sharpest knife in the draw... with a reaction like that i'm not surprised their site still looks the way it does...