Whenspeanspeaks.com
Sean Carter is a young man from Texas that speaks as a motivational speaker. He had an old frontpage site that needed to be updated and had a second pure html site that he wanted combined into a wordpress site. This was actually 2 wordpress templates within single theme.
This was a job frankly I didn’t think I would get or could be done in less than 24 hours from start to finish. Granted a lot of the work was done from reusing the old layout and images from html site. But I would like to think I added my own twist to it.
Job name Odesk 14
Skills: CSS HTML WordPress
March 2012 yourlighterside.com
CSS / PHP – WordPress Theme Fix
A friend and sometime minion, Sandi Jones, Put me in contact with Jamie VanEaton who runs yourlighterside.com I freely admit I didn’t design this site but fixed a LOT of minor CSS and PHP issues with the theme. I was so glad to see that she now has Nike advertising on her site now.
Skills: HTML 5, Jquery (Menus), PHP, CSS 3
Livesite: Lisakholmes.com
This is one I just finished up this week. This is my first Odesk job with the new contract / recovery measures in place. I don’t LIKE to mention and have to use them, but it has been an issue.
Lisa Homes contracted me to do her site, and it was initially to be a ‘copy’ of another site. I did use the three panel layout but everything was custom. Simply put I would much rather write something from scratch than use someone else’s work.
Lisa was an absolute pleasure to work with, and frankly it was a blast.
Lessons learned:
- Never take a job without full access to the Cpanel to move this site when completed.
- Completely define EXACTLY what needs to be done.
- NEVER EVER use absolute positioning with CSS. It just causes problems.
SEO, HTML 5, CSS 3, Jquery WordPress.
Job Name Odesk 11
In early February I won a gig from Buttonbiz.com to redo their site into word-press. This was to be a straight conversion of the HTML to Word-press. This site was anything but. LOTS of JavaScript that just didn’t want to play nice, taking a old site and keeping to look EXACTLY or nearly so as the original site but in word press. I reduced the size of the site as much as possible (eliminating duplicate pages while keeping same structure), redid some of the JavaScript into Jquery, re added the meta tags for every page, redoing most of the pages to update to valid HTML 5 from old unvalidated HTML 4 with lots of errors.
This was one of the last projects I did without a contract and as with Odesk.com policy for fixed rate jobs is absolutely NO SUPPORT if things go wrong. Ryan at Button Buz was great to work with and fortunately this never became an issue.
While I am proud of my work, I stand behind it, this was a lesson in business on how to NOT do things.
Lessons Learned:
Jquery can so some strange things…
Never EVER do a job without a contract.
March was utterly insane.
Several things going on several jobs were done… and there was two casualty’s. Jobs that just didn’t work out. One of is possibly salvageable. The other isn’t. When it comes to business, it’s a learning experience. And as much as I would like to trust folks… simple fact is it’s tough. Not everyone is honest. And when you take a job you have to almost expect things can go wrong.
Lessons:
1) Never EVER work without a contract.
2) Firefox as much as I love it to develop sites in .. just isn’t perfect.
3) Absolute positioning in CSS. The more I use it the more I am convinced it’s a bad idea and try to stay away.
Anyways need to redo the portfolio pages as there is a LOT to be updated and well need a better way to display them all.
