Allchorn Design

You might already know, but I’ve taken up office space in Durban with SA Web Design. A shared environment with Dynamo Africa’s Durban HQ. Things are great so far, and it’s nice to be working from such a professional environment.

Gone are the dogs barkling in the background, although I admit, I do miss working from home in some respects. Well, here are the photographs I took today with some captions.

Waiting room on the left and the corridor into the engine rooms on the right.

I found the first one interesting and the second one hilarious!

Dove Evolution

Slob Evolution

It’s suprising how much of a difference it makes when a client actually goes out of their way to write you an email about how happy they are with the job you did for them. Completely unsolicited makes it even bette…

Recently, I did a (very) small Wordpress driven website for a friend of mine for his up and coming laptop and notebook repair service. Things went anything but smoothly in some aspects like moving from his hosts at the time (no names mentioned) and then some controversy three quarters of the way through when someone criticised me to him sparking some doubt in his mind over my costs. This is what caused me to write about lowballers in the web design industry.

I won’t paste the entire email as there are some bits that are not related to this post (and personal stuff), but since he said:

Wordpress by default makes use of the TinyMCE rich text editor and as such, it’s quite extendable. It’s very well documented in their documentation wiki and does a lot more than what Wordpress enables out of the box.

This is what I was looking to do

Wordpress’ WYSIWYG displaying table editing tools on the bottom row.

Shock horror! I hear some standardistas ranting about tables being evil already. Well, I hate to burst some bubbles, but tables were invented for a reason. Believe it or not, for tabular data!

Lately I’ve had a lot of blog-worthy material rattling around in my brain. Some of which will have to wait, so I’ve filed them all under drafts in my cerebral cortex. Today however I experienced something that personally marks a point at which I believe the website design industry is starting to be irreparably damaged.

Lowballer
Someone that sells products or services for drastically less than what it’s worth.

This isn’t meant to be a rant, but more an expression of my concern over what seems to be seriously effecting the industry. Not just my pocket, but the quality of the web in general and that effects the website owners themselves. The people I affectionately call clients.

This was an interesting little experiment for me. It was an idea I got from filming myself take a motorcycle apart and playing it at 3x normal speed.

I found CamStudio which very effectively recorded all my on-screen movements, and in Movie Maker (I’m a web designer, not a video guru), I stitched it to some video from my Sony Handycam. Threw in some nice music and put some titles and credits in.

Here’s the result.

I had lunch with the exceptionally talented artist Christian Mugnai at Spiga d’Oro today and we had a rather interesting and amusing discussion about things. Chris and I have been mates since we first taught each other swear words when he moved here from Italy… in std 2 (approx. 5yrs old). In amongst all […]

Well, we’ve finally completed the initial shell of the new theme. Together with Cobus over at Radiiate, we’re close to completing this site to a point where I can actually leave it alone (aesthetically) for a while…
Please bare with me as I work on populating the portfolio, doing some bug fixing and other monotonous tasks […]

The Collective are a design and branding agency in Johannesburg, South Africa. I’ve worked with the principal designer there, Leigh Dyson on a couple of projects in the past, and we share a few clients.
They do some truly amazing work in the print field and have an impressive client list.
The design of their site was […]

Things Evolve, you can’t avoid that
You can’t always predict every facet of a project’s lifespan. Things change and evolve as you work on it. As detailed a scoping document you draw up, there are more often than not extenuating circumstances that influence the workflow and final result of any project.

client expectations may differ from those […]