Tag: Web design

You should read this if you have previously received services from Matthew Dawkins Web Design or ChapterNine Web Design.

It’s officially over, and my what a journey it has been!  Way back in 2005 I was approached by the St Albans Diocese Youth Service and asked if would be able to design them a new website or three.  And so my freelance business began, primarily offering web design services for churches and Christian organisations.  The business grew, I took on more clients, and I started providing services such as web hosting too.

But, like all good things, it had to come to an end.  In October 2010 I got a ‘real’ job – a full time position as a web developer for another company, and my own business had to be gracefully turned off.  After a lot of dallying and helping clients out with migrations to other web hosts, today finally sees the final milestone completed.  My old websites are being taken offline and my reseller hosting package cancelled.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who I’ve had dealings with over the years who have made it all worthwhile.  Thanks to Rob for being so helpful, especially in those stressful downtime moments, and for resetting the firewall every time I blocked myself by trying to remote MySQL into something!  Thanks to Ralph giving me plenty of work to do, and for being cause for much entertainment.  Thanks to Anthony for getting me started in the hosting business.  Thanks to Liz for getting me my first job.  Thanks to Ellie for putting up with me, for bringing me cake batter at just the right moments, and for reminding me of the time.  Thanks to David for lending me your clients while you were away.  Thanks to Elliot for giving me work when times were quiet, and for looking after several of my clients when I started closing down.  Thanks to antoniojl for selling me the G5 Mac that’s been so useful the last few years.  Thanks to Phill for the opportunity to collaborate with you on a revolutionary idea.  And thanks to God for leading me down this path, for reminding me at regular intervals that I was still on the right track, for providing for me in so many different ways, and for showing me clearly when the time was right to move on.

Will I offer my services again in a freelance capacity?  Possibly.  I can’t rule it out.  But, that said, one of the lessons I learnt very early on (and had to either ignore or find ways round) was that I’m not a natural businessman.  I hate invoicing people, I find it hard to charge a realistic price for my talent, and I still don’t understand all the jargon of the Self Assessment Tax Return form.  For now, God has led me somewhere new and I’m really enjoying it, so I won’t be hurrying back to being my own boss.  But if you do have questions for me, feel free to ask, and if I get a free moment between family and church commitments I’ll try to answer!

So, for now, it’s adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehen, aloha, arrivederci, hagoonea’, tot ziens, and a fond farewell to all my old clients, colleagues, and various previously-important icons on my desktop.

Yes, this is my second post today, and with the same title, but on a completely different topic.

Some time ago, as some of my faithful readers will know, I got a new job.  That meant getting rid of… I mean, encouraging my old clients to go elsewhere for their services.  Getting everyone’s web hosting moved to new providers was a bit of a challenge, and understandably there were some people who were none too pleased at having to move at all, and others who didn’t have the first idea what might be involved.  So I’ve helped as much as I can, given that I’m no longer actually working from home.

So the time is nearly upon me where all my clients will be migrated, and all that’s left is my own sites.  At that point, I’ll need to move my own sites to a new host too, as I can’t afford the reseller package I’d been using.  An upshot of that is that I can’t really afford to be running lots of personal sites for free, as I used to through my business.  What’s needed is a careful rationalisation of my online presence, to ensure continuity and sustainability.

So here’s what’s going to happen.  ChapterNine (www.chapternine.co.uk) will cease to exist, although I’ll keep the domain for now and just forward that on to another page on another website.  Minipix (www.minipix.co.uk) will also be shut down, again with the domain forwarding on elsewhere.  Now, before you all get cross and up in arms and worried that I’m shutting down my blog, I must stress that I have no intention of stopping blogging, nor of losing the last 10 years’ worth of personal history.  What’s actually going to happen is that my blog will be moved to www.matthewdawkins.co.uk, which will no longer serve as a business website but will be my personal website instead.  So everything you see here on minipix.co.uk will soon appear on matthewdawkins.co.uk instead.  Some of the stuff on ChapterNine will appear there too, as will some of the material currently on matthewdawkins.co.uk.  It’s all a bit confusing, but it’ll make sense once it’s done – basically it’ll all be in one place instead of on three separate sites.

I’m still in the process of building the new site (I’m a web designer after all, I can’t just move it and have done with it, I’ve got design myself a completely new theme to go with it!), but I’m hoping it’ll be sorted out at some point this month.  And, as I’ve said, I’ll keep the old domain names now, so all your old bookmarks and links should continue to work.  It’ll just all appear in one shiny new website over on matthewdawkins.co.uk.

This is a useful Twitter widget - repeats everything everyone else has said.

I’ve never been one for associating with the ‘in crowd’.  I’ve never been particularly interested in trends, fashions, fads or crazes.  Well, I say never… I do remember a time when I was at primary school when Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle action figures were the big thing, and I saw everyone else playing with them, and I pestered my Mum to buy me one, and she did, and the day I brought mine into school was the day they went out of fashion.  It’s scarred me for life.  Not that I’m bitter.

Fast forward a decade or so and I’m still in a similar mindset, though it has evolved slightly.  My approach now is to observe the trend from a distance, and then when it’s established itself and the hype has died down, then I jump on the bandwagon, and hope to goodness that I haven’t left it too late.  As a result, I have never bought a brand new Mac, I still haven’t got an iPhone, I joined Facebook to find most of my friends already there, and I gave SecondLife a spin a year or so too late.  And now it’s happened again.  I’m on Twitter.

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Just a quick note to say that my new blog design is finally live and kicking, with just a few technical bugs to sort out, most notably that comments aren’t working at the moment.  I’m trying to find a solution to that one, and then everything should be fine.  I also realise that the three latest comments have also been lost; I am aware of that, it’s because I’ve moved this site to a new server.  Hopefully I’ll figure out a way to reinstate those comments too.  So, sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to litter my blog with your own thoughts, but I’m working to resolve that!

In the meantime, please do enjoy the new look for the blog, in particular the header image which changes depending on the time of day, and time of year, so check back at different times during the day to see different images.  I’m also quite pleased with the comments post-it notes too, which work quite well.  The only caveat with that is that I have had to put a cap on the length of comments, otherwise it all started to look silly.

Once comments are up and running again, please feel free to let me know what you think.  In the meantime, twiddle your fingers, or if you really do want to tell me something send me a postcard, or a homing pigeon, or smoke signals, or something.

As many of you will know, I maintain and develop the Diocese of Chelmsford web site, which is a big (800+ pages) site with lots of content and serves a lot of people.  One of our monthly printed publications, The Month, is also published online for people to download as a PDF.  I have to be honest, although I upload the file every month I don’t actually read it!  However, it occurred to me that a publication like this would be an ideal place to advertise.

After a few e-mails and phone calls to the publishers, Cornerstone Vision, I ended up sending them a small advert, and I’m pleased to report that it’s in this month’s Month!  The newspaper will be delivered to churches in Essex and East London soon, so you’ll be able to pick up a copy free from any Anglican church in the area, or of course you can download it to view on your computer.  And my advert appears on page 3!  How cool is that?!  I’ve got another two ads lined up for further issues too, so hopefully I’ll see some return on that.

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I suppose it’s a natural progression for all web designers to feel the need to be offering hosting solutions alongside their web sites.  It makes sense from a practical point of view, and of course it’s an extra source of income.  I’ve actually been offering hosting for my clients for a while now, through a friend of mine who has a hosting business, but I’m reaching the point where I need more.  So far I’ve only really been able to offer my hosting packages to people I make web sites for, rather than to anyone else, which is potentially limiting.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time recently investigating all the hosting options available to me.  And there are lots.  Buying individual hosting packages from companies isn’t really an option, as there is so little markup that it’s just not worth considering.  A reseller package is far more suitable, allowing me to set up hosting packages for people without having to worry about the server itself, which is completely managed by the hosting company.  A step up from that and you’ve got Virtual Private Servers (VPS), which gives you a lot more control and room for expansion.  Above that is a Dedicated Server, which is a VPS without the Virtual bit.  I’ll go into more detail on that in a bit.

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Despite having been in the web design industry for several years, it’s taken until this week to get myself into a community of like-minded people in that respect.  I’m surprised at myself that it’s taken me this long.  Still, better late than never.

It all stemmed from a problem I was having, and searching the net hadn’t provided an answer, so I felt asking some actual people might prove more effective.  And so I found myself wandering around the Web Designer Forum, a UK-based community (well, the web site is based in the UK, the members could be from anywhere I suppose) specifically for web designers like me.  I was able to introduce myself, ask my first question, get some responses, and answer some questions other people had, all within a couple of days of discovering the site.  They seem like a genuinely nice bunch of people, so I’m expecting to hang around this site for some time!

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Running your own business means a lot of extra effort, relative to a ‘normal’ job.  True, there are the benefits of being your own boss, working the hours that suit you, taking holidays when you fancy, setting the prices you like.  But in addition to being a Web Designer I also have to handle the accounts, pay the tax man, and do all the boring day-to-day stuff that proper businesses would palm onto someone else.  Thankfully, because my business is relatively small and simple, this doesn’t take too much effort.  Mr Tax Man doesn’t bother me unduly, and the general running of the business tends to just happen.

Of course, there are ways of making life easier for myself on the business side of things.  For instance, keeping track of the business’s money is something I’m keen to do, since numbers are not my strong point, so having a system in place that makes it all blindingly obvious is a must.  So far I’ve been relying on spreadsheets to log the work I do, with a different spreadsheet for each client.  It works, but it’s not particularly efficient.  I’ve looked around on the ‘net, and not found anything that fits my requirements exactly, so I decided I’d make my own.  Nothing like reinventing the wheel every now and then, just for kicks.

And so mWork was born.

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Just quick note to say that I have updated my blog template to the new design I’ve been working on.  It’s not quite finished yet, and there are some links that won’t work yet, but I’m out this evening so those things will have to be added tomorrow.  The basic functionality is there though, and I’m much happier with this design than I was with the previous off-the-shelf one I tried a while back…

Anyway, once it’s all settled in, feel free to let me know what you think of it.

I’ve been hovering on the WordPress forums recently, keeping my eyes peeled for a solution to my missing media buttons following up my upgrade to WordPress 2.5 a week or so ago. Today, prompted by a post by jeenie involving looking at the source code, I had a poke around and managed to get half way there. As you can see from the attached screenshot (which proves it all works!!), I can now access the functionality, even though the images still don’t show. It’s a curious thing, given that it looks like a fairly simple bit of code that oughtn’t to have any problems at all.

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