The life of a web designer does not always revolve around coming up with cool graphics or planning a super new website online. Sometimes, we have day to day chores too (okay, most of the time!) and we have to get old projects and add a trinket or too, update it, add more copy, add an extra menu, etc etc… It’s not glamorous, but it’s a necessary part of the job. And in all honesty, even the updates are a lot of fun sometimes.
Yesterday I cranked it up on my writing for my Social Media Workshop manual, so I had the afternoon free to dedicate to one of my first clients, the Les Madeleines website. Of course, working on it is pure torture with all those pictures of amazing pastries. And the food is that good in real life too. Anyway, today my mission was to change the navigation and the menu page a little. But making changes to an old design has challenges of its own. In this case, I had designed the page with a Dreamweaver template, that at the time was a very reasonable and efficient idea, but that it had backfired in the past year, bugging and going crazy all over. I got tired of fighting with it, and decided it would be faster to actually recreate the site from scratch, now using only good old CSS and HTML, than trying to find out what was wrong with my template. So that’s what I did! Les Madeleines now is live and working good, and looking as cute as it always did!
If you have not yet tried the amazing food at Les Madeleines, schedule your next lunch meeting there! Or go have some breakfast there on Saturday morning, with the family, and then go tour the Library. Les Madeleines is located at 216 East 500 South, Downtown Salt Lake.
Yes, I have been absent for a while. Last year of grad school, hard at work on my thesis, I might not work on too many websites this year. But for this week I have off from my studies, I am programming this lovely website for my friend Denise:
Denise is a very talented graphic designer who lives in Miami. She wants to have a space to collect and share her work with other people. She designed the website look, and now I am using my magic to bring it to life on the world wide web!
I decided to create a website for my photography hobby. It’s not exactly a business, but the website definitely looks like one that would be appropriate for any photographer to use to display and sell their work. In this site I’ll display my best photography work in the following categories: Travel, Portrait and Digital Art. There will also be a link to my “store” of select prints on Deviantart.com. The website is done entirely in Flash, and so far, it looks gorgeous. I still have to get around to do all the galleries and the contact form, but other than that, the website is practically done. It should be up and running in about a month.
The goal of this site is also to be a customizable “template” that other artists can purchase from me to display their work. I will customize content, logo, colors, fonts and images, but the basic format will be the same. Because it is a template, I will be selling them for a lower price than what I would usually charge for Flash website. If you are interested, send me an email and we’ll talk price quotes!
Kathleen’s website, www.adoulabirth.com, is finally up in the web! It was an immense pleasure to work with her and to get to know more about her incredible work. Head out to her page if you would like to know more about the work of a spiritual adoula, or just if you want to admire a beautiful website, that includes pictures of a cute baby. Babies and pets, you cannot go wrong with those!
I did another piece for my dancer series. I love when I can mix two of my passions together, in this case, photography and graphic design. Fun! This one I shot this weekend (Sat. Feb 13th) up in Draper. There was an lighting event from Photowalk Utah, and those lovely girls were jumping in a trampoline for about 5 hours to allow a bunch of photographers from all levels to photograph them. I added the splatters later on Photoshop.
This piece is also up on DeviantArt, right here.
Right now I am working on a proposal to teach a web design workshop for small-business owners. This workshop proposal is part of my Master Thesis at Westminster College. The idea is to plan the classes, write the workbooks and do some teaching in the Fall Semester of this year.
I feel that, independently of hiring a web designer to create a website, the business owners should know the basics about web design and other budget-friendly ways to maintain a strong presence on the web. They should be able to know how to update their own websites, and how to use social media. My workshop would talk about all those things, and I feel it would really benefit the community.
Now, I am on the proposal phase of the workshop. I am writing my plans and ideas, and hopefully it will be approved. After getting the “go ahead,” I will start planning the classes in more details, and writing workbooks to go with it. I hope to have everything up and running for Fall. Then, I’ll make sure to invite you all to participate in the workshop.
A lot of work ahead of me, but it is all good stuff.
A while ago, I worked with Hillary Jean in a High-Key photo shoot. Hillary is a ballerina, so I got a chance to take some beautiful pictures of her dancing and jumping around. Yesterday I decided to use those photos to play them on photoshop. Lately, I have been so occupied with work and school projects, that I have not done a photoshop art just for fun. But this photo shoot with Hillary was begging for some fun to be added… So here it is, still a work in progress, but I am already very happy with the way it looks:
Edit: Now this art is up for sale on DeviantArt, right here. Thanks for the support 
One of the best things about working in web design is the variety of people you meet and the new things you learn from those people. Kathleen pointed this out to me the first time I met with her to talk about her website, about how much fun I always have in my work. And she is absolutely right.
For example, before contacting her to schedule a meeting, I had no idea what an adoula was. Now, after doing some initial research and them meeting with Kathleen, I learned about another fascinating occupation. The work Kathleen does is beautiful, forming a spiritual connection between pregnant parents and their babies from before conception (if you plan ahead!) to birth.
And for such an unique person, I had to come up with a design that would reflect all this beautiful work she does. So far, this is the layout so far:
I am in the initial stages of programming the website now. I am thrilled with this project, and can’t wait to have it online and ready to go.
