Gregg here... long time - no post. Been crazy busy since about September with lots of web design & development classes (and still lots to go). But I have reached a nice milestone in my quest to start my own freelance web design gig, I launched my website earlier this week and it was also my final project for a
CSS class that I had to present at last night.
Along the way there was lots of sleepless nights (seriously), a few tears (well, not really), and a whole lot of F bombs that shocked and awed the House of richteR.
Funny story,... I had a different completed website a few weeks ago and solicited some feedback from various friends and family,... and didn't get much. "hmm, that's odd" -I thought. So I asked a complete group of strangers (that also happen to be web developers) for their feedback on the site in an online web developer group, and proceeded to get ripped apart in a fairly public manner.
"Hey, that's a great site if it was built 10 years ago", or
"your buttons are,... ummm,... interesting", and
"you seem a little dense" (in so many words), and my favorite,
"you should try designing websites without your head up your @$$" (ok, I made that last one up). Anyway, the point is, I ate my humble pie and got the honest unfiltered feedback that only strangers under the cloud of Internet anonymity can provide. So back to the drawing board. I went and did a lot of frantic research to get ideas for a more contemporary site and put in about 30 hours over the last 2 weeks (lovin you Rachel) to completely rebuild my site. I am at peace with the final result, and of course, I still have more work to do on the site to improve and make better (my
Winchester House if you will). Plus, I still have one major problem, 17.9% of the population still uses Internet Explorer 6 as their web browser,... and my website looks like crapola in IE6. Each month though that diminishes by about 1%,... so meh.
I start my next class this Monday, a 10-ish week course on
Adobe Flash, which is hugely popular right now and will bring my website in to an even more fancy state.