November 19th 2007
I bought some advertising with a blog I follow for That College Kid because he was running a special and I wanted to try it out. His site doesn’t really have anything to do with mine, so it’s obviously not doing that well, but I’ve learned and it does bring a good amount of traffic. So anyway, since I bought that ad spot, I’ve had two people email me asking if I want to buy an ad spot from them, which isn’t bad itself - I like that idea. But their sites are shit.
TCK is PR3, and one of the sites was PR2 and the other was PR 3. I’m not frowning on the PR3 site because that’s nothing to scoff at for a few month-old blog, but their RSS count is 37. TCK has three times the subscribers. Beside that, my other stats were better and their layout just sucked. So my whole point is - why do these site owners think I would pay them for a link? They’re not John Chow…they’re blogs aren’t very good. It’s people like this who put ads before content and these are the people that are ruining the web. There’s nothing wrong with making money blogging, I’ve done that for a few years (Adsense mostly, now I do some paid posts). But building a website simply to make money is…sad. It makes me sad thinking about my web history and how long it took me to build up to where I am today and how people are gaming the system and just trying to make a buck. Bah at them.
November 11th 2007
I’m feeling a little better now. I finally put up my portfolio, SA Design. I ended up drawing a picture of Copper and using that as the layout. It only took me about two days to get the illustration and layout done. I’m pretty happy with the results. It looks a lot like Copper. Coloring was hard at first, I’m not very good with illustrator. I’m still not very good at coming up with content ideas for That College Kid or here even. I had to force myself to write this.
Registration is next week for the spring semester. Don and I are taking a lot more hours than we did this semester. Silly me thought college was going to be hard. Freshmen year sure isn’t. I’m still not taking any of my Psychology courses, but that’s okay. I’m still not sure if I want to keep this major. I’m pretty sure though that I don’t want to do computer science…I don’t really want to be a programmer. And I love designing, but I definitely don’t want it to be my career. If I’m not inspired to do my own thing, what could I do for a client? Besides, if I’m a web designer, what would my hobby be?
Don and I went to the beach today. A girl Don works with went with us and she caught all the fish. Don caught a few, I think. Me and Copper played mostly, he’s not big on fishing. I’m a little sunburned, but that’s pretty normal for me. I actually have a pretty decent tan for the first time in my life. It’s nice to finally be a little bit darker even though I really don’t care that much about my skin. It’s skin. Mine’s white. Who cares. It looks good on me. Copper’s sleeping off his long day.
October 31st 2007
One of my biggest pet peeves with professional designers is their invalid coding. If you’re offering your designs, especially when you want to get paid for them, they should be valid. It goes to show that you’re either ignorant or you don’t care. These days, with the multitude of browsers, it’s hard to make sure a layout looks good in all of them, but the easiest way to tell is to make sure it’s valid. You take out the errors and in almost all browsers, it’s not messed up. Except for IE of course, but they’re never going to get on the bandwagon of not sucking.
I’ve been thinking about putting up a portfolio site. I bought the domain months ago when XFluro had a sale to get a domain for $3.50 and I haven’t done anything with it except use it as a test site when developing new layouts. My next chore is to make that domain actually worth something, especially now that my mom’s new website links to my portfolio. SA Design shouldn’t have an index page saying “Coming soon” until it expires.
I also want to break into the Wordpress theme business, but I’m too lazy. I have this incredible lack of inspiration that is getting in the way of everything creative I’m trying to do. I also have a lot of extra stuff to do with this site and TCK. My todo list just keeps getting longer and nothing’s getting done. That said, I really should be studying for my test today…
October 27th 2007
I have a serious lack of inspiration all around. A few weeks ago, I needed to redo my stepdad’s taxidermy website, but I just couldn’t come up with a layout. And then it took me days to finally come up with an idea for the redesign of this website and now I’m onto my mom’s site. She’s a college professor and I’ve been doing her website for…maybe seven years. I remember the first layout I used on it was from Layout Land (or something like that). Seriously, I was like ten. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this stuff since then. It’s incredible.
Her university has this great new logo since they changed their name a few years ago and they’re very anal about its usage. You can’t edit/reproduce it in any way and you can’t resize it. WTF. I had this cute idea to use my mom’s name in place of the university’s name with the star in between, but apparently, I can’t do that. So there went my idea. Besides that, I didn’t know what else to do. So I went and played Nintendo 64 (seriously, I played Mario Kart) and then when I came back I had some ideas. So that’s what I’m working on now, although of course I’m procrastinating.
On a different note, I’m not sure the newest version of Wordpress is necessary for personal blogs like mine. I don’t use tags at all. I really don’t understand the need for tags when there’s already categories. I like categories better anyway, because I’d have way too many different tags. For That College Kid, I use tags, but only for my SEO. I still don’t entirely get all that I’m supposed to do about that. I’m getting visitors and making a little bit of money so that’s all I really care about.
October 19th 2007
I’m in the process of uploading and tweaking a new layout. There are parts missing and pages with errors. I’ll let you know when it’s all finished.
Edit: all done.
