Still As Life

It’s been a while, and how I’ve missed you my poor, neglected blog and readers, it’s been so empty without you.

So what have I actually been doing for the past month? Yep, it’s been a month already! Or it would have been if I had waited two more days to write this, but I’m not sure I can fit it in in two days time.

Uni has been absolutely hectic, and so has work, not to mention, I went to Melbourne for /dev/world/2008 which was awesome!

Now, the list, since I don’t really have time to go into much detail now unfortunately, maybe later?

If you follow me on Twitter, you may be aware of a number of the other projects I am working on, but for those of you who don’t, and even those who do, here we go.

This is what is happening with all of my uni work at the moment:

• I have a draft project presentation to actually present on Thursday at 8am.
• Submit an ASP.NET/VB.NET website with basic e-commerce functionality on Friday along with a feature and bug report.
• Next Thursday I have to present the final project presentation of the draft due this Thursday.
• Next Friday I have to submit a fully functional C# rendition of the Ludo board game.
• On November 3rd I have to display three computational artworks in an exhibition at Kelvin Grove.
• November 5th I have an exam on C#, well, technically on Object Oriented Programming (ITB003), but since the entire subject was based around C#, I assume it will be largely on C#.
• November 12th, my last piece of uni for the year, an exam on web design based around ASP.NET and VB.NET (ITB007).

So, as you can see, I’ve got three really big projects under way and due in very soon, as well as fitting in work and study for those two exams, this on it’s own is enough to keep me pretty busy. Yep, I do make websites for a living, but this is my first encounter with ASP.NET so it is a pretty steep learning curve considering I’ve had to learn it and put together this website (with a team) in about 6 weeks. I must admit though, that I am finding more and more to like about ASP.NET, special thanks goes to @nickhac for his help and advice here. I admittedly am even finding more and more to like about C#, though I am unfortunately way behind on that assignment so there is most of my weekend gone as well as a large part of next week. I will however be going over to Tim’s on Saturday night for a games night, gotta fit a break in somewhere.

As for work, I have 20 or so websites in various stages of completion or undergoing maintenance at this moment, some my own clients, some I am working on with other’s like Jethro Consultants and Webtrix Technologies. So that front is pretty hectic at the moment as well, with at least 3 of the new websites due to be completed by the end of the week - one of the biggest goes live on Thursday morning, watch the news on TerraMedia for more info on it sometime between Thursday morning and, possibly Monday.

What else have I been up to?

As I mentioned, I went to Melbourne for /dev/world/2008, and I highly recommend attending the 2009 one if you are able to! The topics and speakers were great! The sessions I attended were mostly on controlling graphics using the functionality built into Mac OS X including Core Graphics, Core Animation and Quartz Composer. I also went to sessions on business and development and Apple’s intrigueing WebObjects. All these sessions were great and really interesting. Then of course, there was the dinner and trivia night thrown by the team at the Apple University Consortium - it was excellent guys, thanks heaps for all the hard work you put in organising everything! Of course I couldn’t forget all the great people I met there from all around the country!

I also know what I would like for Christmas (or even just for the awesome factor), if anyone is feeling generous, you know those new Macbook Pro’s that are scuttling around, just out of grasp, one of them, I expect to know more in the coming days.

Now, I must get back to doing something productive. I’ll try and write something new for here in less than a month this time, I have a lot to write, just haven’t had the time! So don’t run too far away, or do, but keep the RSS feed handy, here’s a list of what I have to write about, if I forget, it should remind me, maybe:

• Finished Kate Mosse’s “Labyrinth” and have some things to write about it. So I should do that sometime soon.
• I got and have been using a Cooler Master X Craft 250 Lite e-SATA/USB. This is the little brother to the X Craft 350 Lite that I wrote about last month. It’s nice, but it has some annoying quirks.
• I upgraded the 120gb harddrive in my Macbook Pro to a nice big 320gb Samsung drive. Got lots of photos and what not, but considering the new Macbook Pro’s due out soon, this probably is no longer so relevant. My observations might be of interest though, also, it shows just how awesome Mac’s are. Just in case you don’t already know.
• Had a go of that new game that had all that hype surrounding it, what was it? Oh yeah, Spore, that’s right, the Sims go to space! Finished it in 6 hours, or should I say got to space age and did a fair bit then got bored of the constant repetition and quit in 6 hours. Ok, so I’ve pretty much covered how disappointing that was and I probably don’t need to write about it again, but maybe I will, if I can fit it in, maybe.
• There’s probably other things too, if I remember, I’ll write about them, if not, I guess I won’t.
• There are a number of things to go up over at TerraMedia when I finish them, so you’ll have to watch over there too, or just follow me on Twitter, I’ll probably link to anything and everything on there.
• Once I have this ASP.NET assignment out of the way, and probably the C# one as well, there will be a lot happening on my computational arts blog as well, so if you are interested in that, it’ll get busyish soon, it also needs a new design, as does this blog, I’ll get to them soon though, after uni is finished. Don’t hold me to that though.

That’s about it, now this time I actually am getting back to something productive, and maybe dinner.

Catch ya

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As many would know, I work at a store doing the website and network maintenance and make sure all of the emails get answered and so on.

There was an email come through today that reinforces to me the importance of treating a web store like you would a real store:

In a store, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to find what they are looking for.

Online this is amplified because it takes so little effort to leave and shop elsewhere instead.

If prices aren’t shown up front and easily, it takes much more effort to send an email or ring up to enquire about prices, it would be easier to just go to another online store that has prices available online.

A user isn’t going to quickly come back to a site that they know won’t fulfill their needs, so there are potentially millions of users who would never return to the store website.

We don’t display prices on our website for products unless they are in the sales page. Why? Well, the reason that my boss tells everyone is because prices change regularly and there are a lot of products to keep up to date. Really though, the majority of the products on the website could easily enough have pricing put with them because the main price changes occur when the model changes which means the entire product needs updating anyway. Aside from clothing, the majority of prices are fairly stable, and plenty of other stores manage to do it. I really see no reason why we can’t.

If you are considering re-designing your website or would like some advice on how to make your current website work better for you. Please feel free to contact me at Terramedia for a specialised web design quote or help with your website.

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