Dance School Website 2

This website is for the sister school for the earlier Dance School Website, so we were asked to produce it in exactly the same format.

The school is mainly aimed at young girls, unfortunately very few older girls stay on at dance schools in the area. Like the sister school, we turn up for the dress rehearsal of school's dance show and take a couple of hundred of pictures for the website and publish them as quickly as we possibly can. This school does seem to get a lot more interest for the gallery than the first one, which makes it more of a pity that there are so many less older girls staying on.

We had hoped to do more local dance school websites, we really enjoy them and photographing the dance shows, but as with everything time to try to get dance schools signed up as customers isn't on our side when there is sufficient work coming in from other sources. Maybe in the future.

Picture Galleries

It's surprising with so many of these 'did I really' sites that this business ever got off the ground! This one wasn't too bad in style, just the idea let it down, or more accurately the timing and my lack of spending to promote the site.

I decided to write a site for myself that would allow people to upload pictures of events such as weddings, births etc and share them with their friends and relatives. There were a few other sites offering similar offerings at the time, so it seemed a good idea and I was able to price it lower than them. But without the know-how to allow people to upload pictures, it was going to be post the pictures to us, we'll resize them and publish them - a lot of hard work.

It could maybe have worked - the look of the site wasn't that bad - but I was very tentative when I pushed it through Google's Adwords and got cold feet after spending a small amount of cash on a few visitors and dropped the idea. It didn't help that at the same time a few free photo services popped up. And how can you compete against a free service with loads of backing?

The site must have been found though - I got plenty of spam (even after the site closed) from national newspapers trying to sell me advertising space for Christmas gift idea sections. Well, someone found it and thought it worth while!

In the end I used the site for some other project, but let the registration lapse.

Cleaning Product

Well the customer wanted a bright and lively site to promote their cleaning product - and that's what they hot! Pure CSS, no tables. in yellow and green. What more could they ask for with an orange coloured product???

We have talked about refreshing the site and it's something I would dearly like to do - it's another early site that doesn't really look the same standard as more recent sites. But I've been waiting for 21 months (and counting) for the new text... I'm not holding my breath waiting for this one!

Wedding Site

Another one of those early 'did I really try this' sites!

This started off as an idea for earning a bit more cash to support the new business. The idea was to create a local website of wedding suppliers and market the directory to those people. A few did sign up to the site - one even offered to pay for a position, which is surprising the way it looked!

Fortunately, we soon had enough customers to keep us relatively busy and the idea of the site was forgotten and it expired at the end of it's 2 years. It probably didn't help that during my research I didn't find any other similar Southport directories, then when I registered the URL and started to push the site I discovered that there was a very similar site.

It was a learning experience! Wasn't a good financial experience. Didn't cost much, but earnt even less as I never really did much with it.

Primary School

This was a website that we created for a primary school before we were up and running fully. Quite interesting in theory, but the complexities of what they wanted were a little over our heads at the time and they didn't really know themselves what they wanted to use the website for.

Now, we would be able to offer them everything they wanted and much, much more and think nothing of it. But it was their lack of knowing what to do with the site that finally killed it after a year. The staff were uncertain what to use it for and in the end it was dropped.

Shame. It was fun to create and got us started, but it was never to be.

Artwork

This one was a strange site! I was contacted to give someone a quote and never heard from them. So I followed them up a couple of months later, offering to produce a low cost website. Anything to get a small portfolio!

They replied that I should email someone else and I did, built the website using the same business name and only when we were about to go live did they ask why was I displaying their friend's business name on their site. No one had mentioned to me that it was 2 friends in different businesses!

The site seemd good at the time. Now it looks horrible! It was intended to show a few pieces of her artwork and then link into her Ebay sellers area. But after completing the site she gave up with the Ebay and selling the art, so the site didn't last a full year, more like 9 months.

Not a particularly exciting site, but it was a starting point to further sites. They got better!

Dance School

This is definitely our longest standing site, apart from our own site.

When we were first starting out, we enquired at our daughter's dance school about putting an advert into their show's program. As luck would have it, they had been thinking of getting a website done and were looking for someone to do it.

So this became our first 'customer' website. They paid our costs and I put together a bright site. Not the best or fanciest looking, but they are target ting children who are pre-school and early school. Once they get older they are usually settled into a dance school or move by recommendation.

So it's bright and cheerful and they love it and the style has never been changed since the day we showed them the first sample. We take photographs every year at the show and add them to the site, but that's about all that changes.

In The Beginning...

This is where it all started way back when - probably even before we'd thought of the web design business.

This website took on many forms - and I must say that now I look back and none were particularly great. But it worked. It was a website for my in-law's holiday flats designed to show off one or two rooms. Without a great deal of work the site was being found by people across the country and in the USA - bookings were coming in.

I originally used a free tool to create the site, then rewrote it in HTML and published it to free space. It was a long time before a domain name was purchased for this site - the free names were used at first.

It did use javascript throughout the last version. For some reason I thought that was good, not only for scrolling messages but to write the header & trailer of the pages. It was a nightmare to change!

But it did them well until they retired from the business and I let the URL go as the building is now used as residential flats rather than holiday accommodation. I learnt a lot of lessons, and it allowed me to start a portfolio that early customers could look at.

Memories making me cringe...

One of the good things about tackling this new blog is that for every site I've built (with the exception of my own webdesign site!!!), I've got a small thumbnail image from when it was first listed in the portfolio section.

And I've never deleted any!!!

That means I have a record of the sites that I've built, roughly in order of the most recent changes. So if a asite was built in 2005 then remodelled in 2006, it's thumbnail is dated 2006.

But I was just looking through the list in date order and some of them make me cringe! Did I really manage to build a site that looked like some of these and sell it to a customer! No wonder they have given up / gone elsewhere. Current sites are much, much better!

Anyway, first off I'll own up to one of the attrocities I created and has noow gone. One of the sites almost in this category is still with us, but the owner has been promising new material for 2 years to let me update it.

He likes the site, maybe one day it'll be updated.

Welcome

I've thought for a while it would be interesting to documment sites that I've built over the years. To try to go through them in any particular order would be difficult, so I'm bound to miss someone. But it should get a few sites documented and easily readable.

I'll start tomorrow with those sites that for one reason or another are no longer with us. Those where owners have retired, got fed up or moved to allow a 'friend' to manage their site. Interestingly, by the time I get through that little list, hopefully one of those who has left should have returned.

With 4 years of building sites and a real escalation in the number of new sites over the past year, and past few months in particular, it should take a while to get through everyone that I can remember. I'll try to work through 4 per week, maybe 3 when I'm busy. So at current rates they should all be documented by early summer. If new sites continue to go live at the current rate, it will be another 4 or 5 months to document the sites that have arrived between now and then.

Sounds a bit of a daunting task! Maybe 5 posts per week would be better!