My latest endeavors
Hi everyone, welcome back to another random post by yours truly.
I wanted to take a quick minute to update you on what I've been up to. Last December I quit everything that was great with my career in order to pursue my dreams of running my own business. As some of you know, I've been running my own sidebusiness since early 2004. I focus on small businesses and individuals and help them surpass different technical challenges they face in their everyday operations. That's really a fancy way of saying that I'm an IT and Technology consultant.
It's been a bumpy ride, to say the least but I am determined to persevere. After December, I accepted a long term contract with oen of my clients but that fell apart shortly thereafter, for reasons I can't go into. I then found myself out of a job and without the biggest client at the time. Fear set in and instead of panicking and freaking out I decided to embrace this challenge and take time to enhance my support offerings and properly start running my business. That in itself is a monumental undertaking and one that presents many challenges. I thought I was prepared for these challenges but Boy... was I wrong.
The road is difficult and from time to time, I think about giving it all up and going back to the 8-5 thing... but then I'm reminded of my goals and dreams. And so I keep at it. Slowly I've started working with new clients and we're getting things done. Here is the very latest website that I worked on and I thought I'd show you:
The website is for an artist named Sam Carter. He's a talented painter and he focuses on Pop Surrealism. This was a fun project to work on because it is so unique in its content. Here is the website now. It's got a few shortcomings but we are working on them. For example, we have a bit of a repetitive content going on from the store and the gallery. The highlights on the site are these:
- Custom Design & graphics.
- A ready to buy gallery where visitors can buy Sam's art.
- Custom human readable sitemap
- Contact forms & social media integration.
- Automatic updates for visitors via RSS and/or email
The theme we used was the absolutely kick-ass AND free, AND GPL'd Suffusion by Sayontan. Shhh, don't tell anyone, but most of the features I told you about above are actually standard features of the really cool theme Suffusion. I can't say it enough. This theme kicks ass and you should check it out. We also have a number of plugins running but we tried to keep them to a minimum. We are using:
Contact Form 7, wp-e-commerce and Display widgets, along with other plugins that I consider standard plugins I use like PHP-exec, Akismet, Google analytics & WordPress.com stats.
Check out the site and let me know what you think. I'd love to get feedback on it.
I'm also working on a couple of cool projects in collaboration with some Twitter friends and local businesses. I'll be able to show you more later next week. In the meantime, if there's anything I can help you with, please contact me.
