All quiet

Three proposals currently in with prospective clients. No word as yet. All hell will break loose if they all come back at the same time!

Update : Finally got a response beginning of January 2010! Still no content though. Luckily was busy elsewhere.

Stats

Working on compiling useful web statistics for my sites. Info such as page views, number of visits and referrers can give a real insight into the two crucial bits of information about your site. How your site is being used and how people are finding you.

Are you paying an expensive subscription to a business listing site? If so, you need to know exactly how much traffic they are driving to your site. If that's not much at all then you can question the value of their service to your business.

CMS

Got a prospective new client with a requirement for some self management. Looking at drupal again as a possibility for a CMS due to its ease of use.

Exporting a psd to pdf for print

Been updating the business card design for Sarah Bowden at smart-temp. I created the original photoshop psd as portrait document 6.1cm by 9.1cm standard business card size. To get the required printing resolution that needs to be at 944.882 pixels per cm (or 2400 pixels per inch in old money).

In photoshop cs2 I then selected Print with preview and selected the following options.

Then click page setup and then printer. In the printer box choose adobe pdf as the printer tne then click properties.

In the Adobe PDF settings tab choose High Quality Print as the default settings. And away you go.

(Images for this to follow soon!)

Feedback

Still waiting on feedback on my latest sites before I can proceed. In the meantime, enjoy some Duffy

Good clean fun!

I've been working on another project for a Newport based accountancy firm. I've gone for a very clean design on a white background. Still a work in progress so some of the content doesn't match (I copied it from this site) but you can get the idea. http://root.sjinfosystems.co.uk/oneonone

This is amazing!

A glimpse of the future? Apparently Microsoft have this sort of interface up and running in their labs. http://ohhello.tv/index.php/work/view/microsoft_sustainability/

Newport City Truck Stop

Next project. Newport City Truck Stop. Have already done a holding page for this one http://www.newportcitytruckstop.co.uk but need to crack on with the site proper. One of the main considerations for this is that the site should be viewable on a mobile phone. Interesting. To me.

Going Live!

Sarah pleased with the work, so the site has gone live http://www.smart-temp.co.uk/. Sarah's feature should appear in the Western Mail today http://www.walesonline.co.uk/ so will be interesting to see if it impacts the number of visits the site gets.

Update @ 2:30pm : Feature not published today. Still, at least the site is ready.

Footer crisis

Got into a right mess with footers on the new smart-temp website. No matter what I did with the positioning the footer ended up either right at the top of the screen or halfway down it.

After a good hour of struggling with it I finally realised that the footer was set to appear below the last item on the page, but in the actual html was below a fixed size absolutely positioned item. So it was always in the same position on the page. Moved the absolutely positioned item elsewhere in the code so that the footer was at the end of the html after the main content. All working fine now.

Passed back to Sarah for checking. Waiting for response now.

Destroying a session completely in php

Interesting snippet of code. To completely destroy a session and all associated data including any cookies

session_start();

//Clear out all session data
$_SESSION = array();

//if a cookie is set set the cookie expiry date to yesterday
if (isset($_COOKIE[session_name()])) {
setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-86400, '/');
}

//destroy the session
session_destroy();

Smart Temp v2.0

Here we go with the redevelopment of the smart-temp site. Quite a bit of reworking required on the graphical side. New background fade and new buttons. Using a different technique with the buttons using css to apply the graphical highlight rather than a succession of javscript image hovers. Much neater and simpler. The test site can be seen here http://root.sjinfosystems.co.uk/smarttemp2

After liaising with Sarah it seems that I wasn't keeping close enough to the new brief. My imagination was running away with me. So back to basics. No background fade, so we're back to plain white. No gradient across any of the major graphical elements (the flowers and site title) so back to a plain dark purple there. Despite my reservations, it's quite striking. I think I like it!

There is a problem though. Lime green. Hmmmn.

Offline

A faulty internet connection chez Jones this weekend stopped most design work in its tracks. Smart-Temp updates must be done today really.

Crisis Averted!

Urgent phone call from the wife. Morgan Denton Jones is a limited liability partnership (LLP) not an LLB which is something completely different altogether. Fixed it now. All is well. Lawyers eh?

It's live!

New website went live today. Very pleased with it and have had some very positive feedback so far. Admittedly that was from my wife, but nevertheless very satisfying!

Next in the pipeline is a major update for Sarah Bowden @ http://www.smart-temp.co.uk ready for a feature on her that will appear in the Western Mail (http://www.walesonline.co.uk) this coming Wednesday. Guess that's my weekend sorted!

Nearly there...

Just about ready to go live with a new design for the SJ Information Systems website, of which, this blog is part.

Farewell to the old minimalist design. It has served me not at all well. I don't think I ever got a single job from it!

Background

Trying to get this to appear as the page background. Hmmmn.