After a couple of change iterations we seem to be homing in on the best design that our RentACoder company can manage. It has been a real struggle getting them to make the changes I want and push them in the right direction.
I am still not very happy with the ideas they have produced and maybe that is the risk of using a cheap company. You get what you pay for.
Judge for yourself. Here they are….
At last I have managed to get the blogging part of the website up and working. This was actually much easier than I anticipated and largely because of using PHP.
I purchased for just $50 a PHP news/blogging package that adds the full capability to my website. It only took about 30 lines of PHP added to the blogging webpage and it was all up and working. It even includes a nice little html editor for adding new posts and users can add their own comments.
Now I could have tried to do the same thing with ASP.NET but I can just imagine the time it would have taken. I am all in favour of ‘eat your own dog food’ but my microISV is intended to create windows forms controls and not web technology. So I think I made the right choice in going for the quick and cheap option.
Of course, the rest of the site looks a little barren as there is no other content apart from the blogging posts. But one step at a time!
The Eagle Has Landed
My new Dell machine has arrived at last. After spending half the weekend getting everything installed I am now ready to rock and roll. If you have ever thought about getting a two screen system then I certainly recommend it. And not just because it makes your study look like the Star Trek Enterprise!
Your productibity will improve more from buying the extra screen than it will from spending the same amount on the extra .4Ghz processor speed. Just as useful is a RAID-0 config for your drives. This baby just flys!
Doing The Splits
With the release of VS.NET 2005 just around the corner I need to get on with actually producing the free Krypton Toolkit for release at around the same time. Currently I am working on the split container control that has the same functionality as the Windows.Forms version but with our own rendering framework.
So…back to the grind stone.
Product Logos
As outlined previously, the Krypton Toolkit and Krypton Navigator product logos are a bit mediocre. We obviously want to ensure that all the visuals used on the website and in the products are excellent and not just mediocre.
So as usual, we are going to pay a designer to come up with something much better. In the past we have used Guru.com for the main company logo and DesignOutpost.com for the website template.
Both of these websites have produced some great results although you have to be willing to push the designers quite hard in the right direction.
Rent-A-Coder
This time we are going to try another side called RentACoder.com. Despite the name they have plenty of designers that are happy to work on logos.
I have started a project on the site and asked for bidders to come forward to take part in the project. The ceiling price I have established is just $150, which is pretty skinny for creating a couple of professional logos. Still, if you live in the middle of Tibet and want this as extra income outside the main day job then maybe that is quite tempting.
After a couple of days I have had over 30 bidders come forward, bidding anything from $30 up to $100 for doing the project. Many of these are obviously automated answers because the replies have not taken into account the project requirements that I requested. Never mind, that leaves plenty of others to choose from.
The Good…
Some good news at last. The web hosting has been transferred over much faster than I expected and now I have a Linuxmachine hosting my web space space. The domain names are correctly pointing to it and email is still working just fine. It was a painful process with several calls to Network Solutions, but we got their in the end.
In fact you can visit the site right now and see the newly designed website up and running. Well, actually there is only a single page with example non-sense content but it gives the look and feel.
The observant among you will have noticed that one of the navigation buttons is called Blog. I am getting the web designer to setup a blog system that works within the website so there is no need to have it externally hosted as with Blogger.
Once that is working I will copy across all existing posts from here and let you know the appropriate new feed. But I expect this to take a little while yet.
…the Bad…
It seems that my order for a new PC with Dell is going to take another two weeks. When I placed the order the delivery time estimated seemed a reasonable 10 days. But once they have received payment it suddenly jumps by another 14 days. Not that I am cynical of course…
…and the Ugly…
As part of the website design I need a couple of small logos that are used to represent the two products. Have a look and see what you think.
The Toolkit will be the free set of components that will help market the company name and drive interest in the other products. Navigator will be the first actual paid for product.
As the products created will be related to each other it makes sense to have a name for the range they all belong to. Obviously you have now worked out that I have decided on the name Krypton. Hence the green colouring and not the blue you might expect for it to match the website.
What do you think of the name? Do you think the above logos are good enough?
