Yes, I do have another life!

Or at least another aspect of my business life. That is the web design and graphic design part of my working life.

Recently I’ve been working hard on building myself a website for that aspect of my business – something I’ve neglected while I’ve been busy working on other people’s sites!

And finally it’s done (well, as done as a website ever gets!). If you’re interested in having a look you can visit the Web design & more website.

If you’re interested in the ins and outs of running or promoting a website, you can also check out my web design blog.

I have *finally* (pretty much!) finished a very large and complex web project this week. It’s something I’ve been working on directly since August, but it’s actually been in the pipeline and being talked about and nutted out for over three years now!

In recent weeks I’ve been spending almost every waking moment on the task – with one working day going for over 30 hours straight! As you might imagine, I’m exhausted. Plus I’m extremely behind with almost everything else in my life, having kept up with little else but some sleeping, some eating and getting jewellery orders out for several weeks.

So if I’m overdue sending you an email or a convo right now, this is why!

There are a few loose ends to tidy up on the project, but I’m already starting to catch up on the rest of my life.

And shortly I will finally be able to dive into preparations for the holiday season, which I hope to be a successful one for my handmade jewellery business, given that this will be my first Christmas of being fully self-employed.

If you’re interested in seeing what I’ve been working so hard on, you can find it here: www.ethics.org.au. If you’re familiar with the site, it will probably not look much different to how it did before the new site was sent live. But under the hood it’s been completely overhauled and turned into a dynamic site with much more and much better functionality.

After proving to myself that I am my own worst design client, I have finally completed a much-needed redesign of my main website at www.simonewalsh.com.

This has also been rolled out to both of my shops – the international jewelry shop and Australian jewellery shop.

The previous design of my site and shops was done in a great hurry after I lost confidence in the primary online selling venue I had been using to that point and decided I needed my own independent shop to best look after my business.

In the space of about three days I had the site design mocked up, built, tested and rolled out. This was an impressive turnaround time, but I had always meant to go back and rebuild it with a design I was happier with. And finally it’s done!

If you encounter any problems in using the new design please let me know.

Next to do is a redesign of this very blog – another project that’s been on the cards for a long time! I hope to get to that in the next few months with any luck.

A launch discount

To celebrate the launch of the redesign you can take advantage of a 15% discount using the code redesign when you checkout (valid to 19 August 2009).

This discount code is valid in both my handmade jewelry shop (prices in US$, shipping everywhere) and my handmade jewellery shop (prices in AU$, shipping to Australia and NZ).

A while back someone on Etsy made a post about Moo cards which sounded intriguing. So recently I went off to www.moo.com to investigate … which resulted in me picking up 200 of them from my post office box today! And I’m pleased to report that they’re fantastic.

Moo hooks into your Flickr account and you can choose up to 100 different photographs from your Flickr stream to have printed in a single set of little cards and with up to five lines of text and an avatar on the back.

They’re about half the height of a regular business card and are excellent quality with my very favourite matte finish. The best news is that they’re US$19.99 plus shipping. My mind boggles to imagine just how much it would cost to have up to 100 different cards printed like that in Australia!

So if you’ve got a Flickr account and especially if you have a business to promote, I highly recommend that you go off and and become Moo’s new best friend! You know you want to.

PS. Speaking of moo … hi PWIL!!

At around 5am this morning I finished uploading and fidding about with the new St James Ethics Centre website – well, the interim version of it. I’m sure there will still be a few teething problems to sort out as things get settled, but so far I’m very happy with it and very relieved to finally have made it this far.

It’s been a very big job indeed for just one person to get it to this point. The planning/scoping, site organisation/navigation, visual design, CSS and XHTML coding, content editing, content writing, search engine optimisation, etc. has all entirely been done by your’s truly. Although there has been lots of input along the way from the programmer who now needs to complete the rest of the project – which includes lots of rather spiffy functionality that the two of us have been working out for much of this year – forums, blogs, a wiki, RSS feeds, a full user accounts system and much more.

In a fit of complete exhaustion and ‘over-it-ness’ I have decided to take a few days away from work and this project. Instead I plan to finally catch up with jewellery-related things. I have a lot of making to be doing – and more besides. So I should have some pretty things to share soon enough!

There are other interesting things going on too.

Tomorrow night I plan to go to the opening of the Expeditions exhibition in which my Istanbul box is showing. So I will actually be out and being social, which will be odd!

Although I also did a little bit of socialising in Adelaide over the weekend – yes, I was in Adelaide *again*. This time for a meeting of a small group of people representing contemporary jewellers and metalsmiths from around Australia to discuss the way forward for creating a national body. It was an amazingly productive meeting and instead of getting bogged down in complications we actually resolved a lot of stuff and finished early! It seems the focus for the national group will be a website, which I think is a fantastic idea and which I hope to be involved with if I have the capacity. But more about that later.

I’ve also just got around to reading a flier that someone at the meeting in Adelaide gave me. It’s for some gold and silversmithing masterclasses being held at the Australian National University in Canberra in early January. One is purely silversmithing – forging, alloying, ingot preparation, finishing processes and more. I’ve never done much in the way of real smithing before and I’m very keen. Even despite the fact that I’d need to spend five days in Canberra!

Plus there’s another exhibition looming that I must make three pieces for (seeing as that’s what I’ve said I’ll put in!). This one is run by JMGA-NSW. The exhibition, Takeaway, will be showing at Gaffa Gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney later in the month. It’s a pre-Christmas selling exhibition, the idea being that when you buy the work you take it with you in a little cardboard takeaway container – and your purchase is replaced by a polaroid image of it. More about that when I’ve got something to show you!

And in personal news, a legal matter I’ve had floating around for a little while to do with a car accident I was injured in (as a passenger) several years ago has suddenly been resolved much more quickly and positively than I’d ever expected. This means that some money is heading my way and that’s going to make life easier and may even allow me to invest in some tools I need, amongst other things. Although of course it doesn’t make my rather persistent neck/headaches go away! But it will help me feel less grouchy about that.

So … consider yourselves updated! And I promise I will write more interesting things soon.

And neglecting almost everything jewellery-related, unfortunately – although I have managed to catch up with things a little bit today.

What has been devouring my life over the last little while (and for much of this year, to be honest!) has been a very major web upgrade project I’ve been undertaking for St James Ethics Centre (which, despite its name, is not a religious organisation – although it is a non-profit).

Currently I’m working around the clock to get an interim version of the new site ready to go live – hopefully by the end of this week.

The interim website will feature none of the (rather amazingly good!) functionality that is to come – new forums, blogs, a wiki, a proper user accounts system and much more – but it will feature the new visual design and site organisation. And it will allow me to get back to doing my regular work (and hours!) while my friend the programmer (Hi Colin!) gets on with his part of the slaving away.

The interim version of the site upgrade was supposed to be a quick thing to do as the rest of the project has taken much longer than we’d hoped (as is always the way with these things!), however, even this has proven to be a very time-consuming task.

So I’ve spent much of the last couple of weeks wading through hundreds of pages to ensure the new formatting is correct, fixing any errors, doing some editing of content and writing new content.

I’m exhausted! And I’m very much missing my workbench and tools. However I do hope to get back to them soon.

But until then the only handmade thing I have to share with you is a very sneak preview of the new site design. Note that very few – if any – of the links will work at this point – and that in a week or so this interim link will most likely no longer function!

You can visit the creakingly old version of the website for a comparison (which I also designed and built, but several years ago when the organisation had a vastly smaller site and when web standards were only talked about by people who insisted that all links should be in blue and underlined … and we hate those people).

Edit: I’ve changed the links in this post as the new site is now live!