So I’ve been pretty quiet over the last while on the blog. Well I’ve been busy … love / life / lust and the eternal search for the perfect donut as always. Well one of the projects I’ve been working on with Blacknight recently is Get Personal With .Me. It has been a fun project to work on why not head over and see if your name is available? It is about you it is about .me Enter your firstname / lastname and hey presto it’ll check if your .Me name is available. I always love working on new projects and this one is obviously my new baby . I especially love working on...

I’ve been working on some newsletters over the last few months and in general they have gone fairly smoothly. We’re using mailchimp to send and its a great tool but at times it really does my head in. I’ve come up against a few cases where things have disappeared and other issues within their UI … its also at times a bit of a nightmare navigating through things in there or maybe its just me. It also at times feels incredibly slow navigating through it. Will this stop me using it ? Hell no .. their pricing model is very good not to mention the reporting on your campaigns I find...

One of the most common questions I see over on the likes boards.ie or iwf.ie is, which domain extension should I get? I’m always quite surprised by the question I have to admit. Usually people want to know if they should market their business as the .ie (Irish Country Code Top Level Domain – cctld) or the .com and which they should buy. Me being me I think to myself idiots the .com costs about six quid and the .ie costs about 20 quid. You’re talking 26 quid to have both and I mean if both are available I’ll always be saying to take them. So why are people so hesitant on...

Time flys when you’re having fun. It also seems to fly when you’re really busy. Its now over 2 years since I registered the domain name gluas on behalf of the GLUAS working group. Points of contact change and people come and go within groups so I was contacted a while back to start making a few updates on the system. Of course given the power I’d like to do a redesign of the site but thats something for another day. I originally created the logo for GLUAS and I have to admit its one of my favourite logos I’ve created to date. Integrating the track lines so to speak to the base...

How long is a piece of string? One of the most common questions I see on IWF and on boards.ie web design and web development forums is the age old question of what should I be charging?. In the land of the freelancer there seems to be three ways of doing things. Fixed rate to do a site Hourly Rate Make up a Quote on the project If you’re offering a fixed rate well you should probably have a look at the hourly rate tables. Factor in the amount of work involved and see if you’re in or around your ideal wages. As to what you should be charging in your hourly rate well you’ve a few...