GMayfieldIT

Since taking early retirement after more than 30 years in IT I have taken to producing web sites for friends. Each one so far has had it's own challenges and been fun it's own way.

	The riding school that my daughter rides at had a web site but were getting nothing of benefit from it. Due to issues the old site and URL were abandoned and I started again by producing the site they now have where they are getting or 3 enquiries a week about lessons, liveries, parties and more. It is satisfying when a site works like this one. A shop was added later and a 'forum' for the younger riders. The riders now seem to have deserted the forum in favour of Facebook. Must move with the times though...
	I am a member of this model club and was asked to produce a web site. It's been static quite a while and I am not 100% happy with it so am putting it back to "work in progress" - because I can.
	Images are not my strong point... I couldn't draw water from a well! So when I volunteered to assist Michael I asked what he had in mind. He pointed me at another site - written in Flash - something I don't have - so a little creativity was needed. I asked my resident artist for a few sketches and played with a few ideas and came up with this site - which he tells me he likes. I do and please click the image and visit his site. As you move the mouse around things will happen, but make sure your sound is turned on and turned up. I do handle images but I can't draw them!
	We shop at Soundbites and when they asked for some one who could help them set up an online shop I was happy to volunteer. Having set the shop up for the riding school it would be straightforward. Nothing is ever straightforward. They felt it's presentation was too American - very fair because it is American. That was simple to do. They wanted it to look different so a few changes were needed there. They have an EPOS system where stock availability and prices etc are maintained and they wanted this to interface to the web site - very logical. I wrote an interface within Excel as this would be the quickest way. This works very well now but occasionally there is a change needed so I now support this remotely and this works brilliantly. More recently they wanted a 'favourites' module and there isn't one available so I wrote one - my first real foray into PHP programming and it was fun. No doubt there will be more challenges in the future.
	Just to illustrate image handling - when they wanted to add the link to the site as the shop became live the images they sent me were wrong so I had a play and tried to make the images as close as possible... but without the originals to work from. So why don't I maintain the home site? It suits them to do it themselves but I would be prepared to add it on in the same volutary manner.

 

Gerry