Archive for the ‘General’ Category

What exactly is up with the silly and meaningless use of “Rockstar” and “Ninja” that is proliferating around the web? “Rockstar Developer”, “Rockstar Designer”, “CSS Ninja” etc. I know it’s a joke, but it’s also moronic.

Tell people what you do, and why you’re good — don’t pretend to be a musical genius or a silent assassin. You’re not. There was a time, pretty recently in fact, when we were all keen to “keep it real.” What the hell happened?

(Of course, if you actually are a rockstar or a ninja, then stop moonlighting as a web professional, you’re taking work from the rest of us!)

Here’s a quick snapshot of my current availability.

• I’m not taking on any more web design projects until January 2009.
• I can turn around small XHTML/CSS slice-and-dice projects until 19/12/2008. If you have a design that needs some CSS love, you should still get in touch.
• I am on holiday between 20/12/2008 and 5/1/2009. If you’re an existing client and need support during this time, I will make arrangements individually with you.

Thank you everyone for business this year. It has been very much appreciated and I look forward to creating more good stuff for you next year. :-)

These were the terms I typed into Google tonight to try and get some clue about my slow performing Wordpress blogs. The results that came back were enlightening: far from being the reputable company I once thought, MediaTemple have become a bit of laughing stock. Why? Overselling. (more…)

I recently went from zero blogs to two, more or less overnight. It appears I may have not thought things through clearly.

I currently have this blog and another at palemovie. The intention was to use palemovie as my personal blog and friskdesign as technology centric. Upon consideration this seems overkill (and it’s also a lot of work keeping both maintained). So I’ve decided to only use friskdesign and have migrated previous posts over from palemovie. If you’ve bookmarked palemovie, ditch it and use friskdesign instead.

Welcome to my new portfolio website.

Since I decided to recently leave a new full time job and return to freelance web design, I’ve been so busy with work that it’s been difficult to get this new portfolio online!

However, after several weeks of evening work designing, tinkering and experimenting, I finally got there and tonight I uploaded everything. For the first time I have also started a blog — in fact I’ve started two! The blog on this site will cater for web and technology related discussions; more personal musings about goings-on in my private life can be viewed over at palemovie.

For now, it remains for me to say thankyou to those people who stuck by me in my recent turmoil. I feel very happy with my decision and I look forward to developing some great work for excellent clients.