My web design site is ready!

After a long time of messing around with different themes and functionality, I've finally ended up with something that I'm quite happy with.

I present to you my web design site, Web Design 4 You:



 

Click on the image to go to the actual website itself. Have a look around.

It's nice and simple, with a minimalist but professional look that I'm happy with, while presenting information about all the services that I offer. It's also 'responsive', which means it can be viewed on any device, regardless of the screen size. (If you resize the browser while viewing it (or even this blog), you'll see what I mean.)

I went through a few themes before I found this one, which I've worked on all day today to get to where I want it. And now I'm happy. I can relax.

I'm happy that it's completed before I head off to Melbourne tomorrow, so that I don't have to worry about it while I'm gone.

I'm taking my laptop with me though, so that I can still write blog posts or do website design while I'm gone. You never know where you might find a client...

Speaking of clients. You might be a client of mine, and you just don't know it yet.

I'm offering free website hosting for 12 months for anyone that contacts me to design or redesign a website for them, if they say they read about it on my AlansJourney blog.

That means you. Get in touch with me if you're interested in any of the services I offer you.

I'm going to Melbourne this Friday

I'm driving down to Melbourne this Friday to start physically looking for a house for Fanfan and I to live in. I'll be attending open homes and applying for the ones that I think will be suitable for us.

I'll be staying there until I find us a place, and then come back to Canberra.

Our departure date from Canberra is the 25th March. Well, for me it's the 25th. Fanfan has some work that will keep her here until the 29th, when she'll drive down to Melbourne and join me in our new house. Whatever it might be.

Hopefully it'll be near the beach. Fanfan is a bit of a beach baby, and she loves the beach, so that's up the top of the list of considerations when looking for a house. And it'll be the south-eastern area of Melbourne, which is a nice area and where Fanfan used to live before she moved up to be with me in Canberra.

I booked a room with someone on airbnb.com.au tonight. I'll be staying with them for 4 nights, but I confirmed with them that they're available beyond that, just in case I can't actually secure a house this weekend.

Between you and me, I'll be trying my damnedest to get a place that will suit us. I'd rather not be down there any longer than I need to be.

Time is passing, and the moment is getting closer. It's very exciting!

I've been busy

I should apologise, to you and to myself. I haven't been keeping up with my daily posts of 500 words. I've been focused on my web design website and the work I'm setting up for myself with that.

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time working on some documents that I'll be using for the business -  Proposal document, and a Contract. Both of them are going to be very important for generating business with a client, and then locking in a commitment from the client.

Not to mention the work I've already started doing for the client I already have.

And planning a move to Melbourne.

And fine-tuning my web design business website. And advertising it on Facebook (more about that shortly).

It's been very exciting, but most of my waking hours have been in front of the computer setting myself up as best I can with my business. It's not something I've found annoying or tedious in any way. It's been awesome.

Now, about Facebook....

I wanted to try an experiment, just to see what would happen. I purchased a promotion of my new Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/webdesign4you.biz) to get about 4-18 'Likes' per day. After 4 days so far, I've had it exposed to almost 6,000 people on Facebook in various countries and received 49 Likes so far from people who aren't my friends (12 of my friends have Liked the page). It's been about 11-12 Likes per day on average, which is ok.

But from that exposure and those Likes, no one has contacted me for web design services. I'm doing this particular promotion for 7 days at $6 a day. If only one person contacts me to get me to design a website for them, then the promotion will be worth it and I'll continue it. But if no one contacts me, then the promotion will be useless and I'll discontinue it after 7 days.

I decided to do another experiment. A couple of days ago I made a post on the Page about how anyone contacting me from Facebook for any web design services would receive 12 months of FREE web hosting!

That's a pretty good deal.

I had about 50 Likes at the time, but after 24 hours, Facebook had only shown that post to 7 of those people who had Liked the page. So I spent $5 to promote the post to all of them plus a few thousand people in various countries.

It's been 24 hours later, and almost 10,000 people have seen that post offering them something free. You'd think at least 1 person might be interested enough to contact me to discuss what I could do for them, right?

From that promotion I've had only 2 people Like the post, and 2 people clicked on my photo. From 10,000 views.

That's pretty amazing. From this exhaustive and conclusive experimentation, I've determined that advertising on Facebook is likely to be a waste of time and money. But I'm sure Facebook will reap wonderful rewards for it.

I think I'll be sourcing other avenues of promotion.

I'll continue using the Facebook page to promote my business there, because it's an avenue of exposure that I think may be good for me in the short term, even if it's just to get more people Liking it and seeing what I'm promoting. I'll probably do a weekly campaign once a month to generate increased exposure, but I won't be expecting clients from it.

Of course, if I do get a client from it, I'll eat my hat enjoy a wonderful cup of coffee as my reward for a positive and rewarding marketing campaign!

And I've managed to write 597 words tonight. Woohoo!

Feminism has won this battle

When I recently (manually) migrated all of the content of this blog back on to the server it used to be, I left behind all the stuff I wrote about feminism. I decided to leave it out of this blog and transfer it to a new blog that would be dedicated on pointing out the stupidities of feminism, so it stayed on my old Ghost blog, still sitting on a VPS, waiting for me to start migrating it to a new dedicated blog.

Which is where it stayed while I forgot about it.

And then this morning, as I was looking at an invoice for the VPSs I was using, I thought to myself, I don't need them any more. So I paid the amount owing to the VPS provider, and then proceeded to delete the VPSs and all the content on them. It was a purposeful decision - everything I wanted had been migrated, and so the VPSs were deleted.

I was out having a coffee with a friend this afternoon when I got the idea to write a new post for the anti-feminist blog I should get around to creating sometime. And then I remembered all the anti-feminist posts were still on the Ghost blog. Which had been deleted.

Everything I'd written about the evil influences of feminism was now gone.

Sigh.

[Tweet "Feminism has won this battle, but the war isn't over yet."]



I'll just have to start the new, dedicated blog with new content, rather than old, angry content. I suspect, however, that this could be a good thing.

Click to Tweet

I saw a blog post the other day that talked about offering up quotes within the writing that you do, but doing it in such a way that the readers can instantly tweet the quote to their Twitter followers if they think it's worthy enough.

I liked the idea, so I decided to implement it myself. My first post with this integration included was last night's post, Back home from the holiday.

The idea with it is to make it easier for readers to share something of interest to their followers, which is to ultimately make it easier for me to increase my exposure of this site to new people that might normally never get to know about it.

I also liked the idea because it encourages me to come up with something snappy in my writing, something I can use as a 'Tweet this' kind of quote. I like the encouragement to my creativity.

What about you? Do you think it's too much, too cheezy? Do you like it or hate it? Please let me know what you think.

Back home from the holiday

It was a brief holiday my wife and I had, traveling up to Sydney yesterday for the Bruce Springsteen concert, staying overnight, and coming back home today. Just like the concert was, it was a wild and wonderful ride.

We caught up with a good friend of mine, who's been a very good friend since I met him in August last year.

I met a very friendly fella at the restaurant tonight. He’s a regular there, he was there last night too (it’s a good restaurant, I went back to it tonight), and we got to talking. Very interesting conversations for almost a couple of hours.

As a result of all those very interesting conversations we shared, for hours every night, he and I became so close that I invited him to my wedding, and it was my honour that he was able to attend.

And then I was honoured that he was also able to attend my birthday a month later, in late November.

It's rare to find someone in your life that you can establish a strong and immediate connection with, but when you do, you really should treasure them. I certainly do.

[Tweet "Treasure those rare few people in your life who help you become a better person."]

We had lunch yesterday, and it was great to catch up. After lunch, Fanfan and I went to our nearby hotel and checked in, chilling out a bit before heading off around 5pm to the venue where we'd be seeing Bruce Springsteen.

It was less than a year ago when I saw him last, when he last played in Sydney. To have him return only 11 months later is just... well, it's just awesome.

I'm too tired to talk about it as I'm writing this. I'll write up a review over the weekend to go along with THE TWO HOURS OF VIDEO I FILMED OF HIS CONCERT!

Oh my.

As I discussed in my post, I'll be seeing Bruce Springsteen in less than 2 weeks, I was going to be taking my 'better-than-my-smartphone' camera:

This time around I’ll take my super-zoom camera and see if I can get some better photos than I did last time, when I used my phone.

I didn't take any photos. I took video instead. I think about two hours of video.

I managed to get all of his songs that he sang on video, but not ALL of those songs. Some songs I recorded all of, others I just recorded some of. Unfortunately, I ran out of space on the SD card halfway though his very final song, Dream Baby Dream, which I thought was sad, but I was happy it didn't run out halfway through the concert....

One of the things about Bruce Springsteen is that he puts his very soul into his music and his singing. It's very much apparent when you see him live. And he's been doing this since he started in 1972.

[Tweet "Bruce Springsteen shares his life's purpose with us. Inspirational."]

We got home (the hotel) from the concert and into bed by about 1:30am. We woke up this morning around 8, checked out of the hotel and went to a nearby cafe for a coffee and croissant. The weather was lovely, nice and sunny and a pleasant temperature. A nice change from the torrential downpours yesterday.

After breakfast we went off to Bondi, where I took some lovely photos and my wife enjoyed a swim in the Icebergs Pool.

I'll share some of the photos later too, in their own post. Not tonight. Need to write this and then sleep the sleep of the dead.

Why the sleep of the dead? Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but after the Bondi trip, we went somewhere else in Sydney and caught up with one of Fanfan's old friends from China and had lunch with them for a couple of hours, and then drove back to Canberra for three hours.

As soon as we got back, we had to freshen up and go out to dinner with another friend.

And now it's 11pm, and I'm so tired. But you're important to me. So I needed to write to you to give you an update. I hope you appreciate it.

"Why are holidays so short?"

That's what my wife asked me today, when she was talking about how she was sad that we had to go home after our brief two day holiday in Sydney.

And of course I had to describe that during our brief holiday, I was still 'working'. I did a brief amount of web design work in the hotel room yesterday, and I had a call with my client today about some of the templates - and I was working while we were on holiday.

I explained that today, we were living my dream. To be able to travel, enjoy ourselves, see the sights, relax, experience new and wonderful things, while relaxing, and while still working at the same time.

Today we were living my dream. And I want to continue finding and creating opportunities to make that dream a reality.

Time for sleep. Goodnight!

The migration back to cPanel is complete

Some time ago I got excited about self-hosting on Linux VPSs (virtual private servers). I got so excited that I transferred all my hosting to self-hosting solutions on my own servers. But then the pain began.

There was a huge learning curve associated with learning how to keep a Linux server operational that was hosting my most important site (this one). At first I was excited. A lot. But then it just became annoying.

I wanted to focus on building my blog, not keeping servers operational. It was a direction that I ended up being unhappy with. I didn't enjoy having to (choosing to) get up at 1am to reboot the server (a lot easier and faster than logging into the server with VMWare Workstation to restart services...) because I received a notification it was down...

So the solution was to return to shared hosting on Apache servers using cPanel for backend domain and website administration.

I know, I know - technical mumbo jumbo stuff. But at least it was technical stuff that I was familiar with and was skilled with. There was no (not much of a) learning curve. I could just do what needed to be done, and get back to what was important to me - writing.

Although lately, it's not just writing that's important. It's also web design.

So I need backend servers that are just going to work, that are maintained by someone else so that I don't have to worry about them, but with an administration interface that allows me to setup and manage multiple websites simultaneously, without any issues.

Ah, it's good to be back where I used to be. It feels... comfortable.