Back to Websites

After a long period of inactivity on the website design and publishing front, I'm finally back in the production saddle, with a couple of projects being worked on at the moment.

I'm delighted to be helping www.hearth.co.com to bring their new website together. Based on a very simple and clean-looking template, the site is initially a single page that is device responsive and elegant.

I'm loving working with pre-made bootstrap templates more and more as I slowly get used to the CSS that the main part of the platform uses. As always, the more you do, the easier it becomes. Using a pre-made template as a starting point dramatically reduces the time-to-complete on a project like this. In this case we took considerably less than 20 hours for the whole page, including all the graphics, text and quite a bit of troubleshooting on the hosting side.

It always surprises me when I add up just how much software goes into the creation of even something as relatively simple as this: Photoshop, DrawPlus X8, Paint.NET, Notepad, Expression Web, Atom, Opera and FileZilla all have their part to play in the construction of assets and editing of code.

I use DrawPlus X8 to create graphical assets - buttons, logos, etc. It is a bit long in the tooth now, but I'm very familiar with it and well aware of the limitations. I do have Serif's Affinity suite, but just can't quite be as productive in the newer tools yet.

Photo editing and retouching is split between Adobe Photoshop and Paint.NET. I could probably do almost all of it in the latter package - which is free - but Photoshop has the power to do some really amazing stuff very quickly.

Like some of the other software I prefer, Expression Web is a competent editor, but now very out of date and unsupported. I'm slowly switching over to Atom - a very modern, open-source code editor with some really great features. I still need to have something like notepad handy as well, for quick edits and temporary space.

Finally, My browser of choice is Opera - they are almost all Chromium-based at this point anyway. It has a nice developer console that helps with debugging javascript and css codes. Upload to the final webspace is with FileZilla, a great free FTP client that I've used for many years now.

Don't get me wrong, websites can and do sometimes cost thousands, but with a little care, you can have something that reflects positively on your business for just a few hundred pounds.

Changing Circumstances

 When you've basically done the same thing for more than 20 years, it can be easy to become just stuck in the rut. I have helped at Copycat / Computers4-u for more than two decades - all of this century - but that has now come to an end.

The decision to leave was mine, and I'm not going to go into my reasons, but now I am able to focus more clearly on what I want to do and how I want to do it.

One of the first of those things is to get back into creating websites and enjoying the process. This is something that I have slowly fallen behind in over the last three or four years and I need to bring my skills up to date.

My first attempt is with my own primary site www.davidkinrade.com. I've found a nice template online - there's no shame in cheating a little - and modified it to suit my needs. I've created some new graphics and cut down the content dramatically for a more modern feel. The major changes are in design philosophy. This site is "responsive". In web terms, responsive means that the layout and organisation of the site responds to different screen sizes and devices. It works equally well on a mobile phone screen, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop and across all major platforms.

Expect more like this to follow in the future, as I do appear to have been bitten by the design bug once more.

Out of Lock-down

There are some experiences that, perhaps, one would hope to never have to go through. As an island community, the Isle of Man has come through the COVID-19 pandemic better than many other places. Any island nation has the option - as we did here - to close the border and then tackle the pathogen on our own terms. This is a process that has worked for our island and several other places around the world.

It can be easy to criticise the political and governmental structure with the power of hindsight, but I have to say, not without a little reluctance from force of habit, that our government did as well as one could expect when difficult circumstances were changing and developing rapidly. They didn't get everything right and that's actually okay. No-one can, or should, expect a perfect response during such a crisis and there will always be mistakes made as the information available changes.

So, things are returning to some level of normality. My sister and her family are back on the island after their necessary exile to the UK. Shops are open and businesses are starting to resume normal operations.

I'm back at work and doing more-or-less the same thing as before. I tried - despite the debilitating attack of sciatica that plagued me for almost two months at the start of lock-down - to keep myself busy and productive. I managed some programming, did a few remote assistance calls and tried to not resort to endless TV or YouTube.

I also finally got the time to write the detailed travelogue that I always promised myself would be done one day. In 45,000 words, I've written the story of my eight trips to Africa over the last dozen years. I'm now in the final process of reviewing the proof copies before self-publishing the volume through lulu.com. The plan, at the moment, is to release a paperback version - with over 100 b/w photos - in 320 pages. because of the photos, this will end up being priced at around £25. Because this is a lot for a book, I'm also looking at doing a text-only version that should be able to be much more sensibly priced. This will also make it easier to produce an e-reader compatible version for kindle and ipad in the near future.

If you want to keep up with progress on the publishing of this book, and also about my travels and other book projects, then you can find out more at my publishing site.

COVID-19 Contingency Plans

As I write this, the Isle of Man is not at the stage of lock-down yet, but we have to try and make plans to keep civilisation going!

So, as things stand, I'm able to make calls to anyone who is not isolating. I would, however, prefer to fix software related problems remotely if possible.

So, if you need help, by all means call me on my usual mobile number: 469115. If possible, have TeamViewer installed before you call and we'll try and get logged in straight away and see if I can at least do some diagnosis. This doesn't help if it's a networking problem, but we'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

I'm also available on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger most of the time.

Stay Safe!