I’m happy to announce the launch of drdebbie.com. I have been working on this project for since November and it is now complete.
This website was a fun little project that I absolutely enjoyed working on. My client approached me with a request to take her existing design and bring it to life. One of her requirements was to have a content management system that would make it easy for her and her to edit the different sections on the website as she needed.
My suggestion was to go with Joomla because it is very easy to learn but also a good platform for websites that have the potential of growing.
After watching Simon Sinek on TED.com (How great leaders inspire action) I have been thinking about the term Mission Statement. At first, when I thought about the term, it reminded me what many companies in corporate America write on their walls but often it represents what they are NOT about or what their history used to be like rather than what they are aiming to be. As someone who experienced that side of the industry, I was turned off just by thinking about it.
The more I thought about it though, I started to see that there might be a point here. There are so many ways that we can go and maybe even lose our self while trying to reach what we decided is “success”. If we know what our mission is, we can always go back to it and remind ourselves why we’re doing what we’re doing. So, yes. The mission needs to be stated and maybe even re-stated as time goes by and situations change.
In addition, I think that it is ok to have more than one mission statement because it is hard to have one statement that truly reflects all the different aspects of your life. You could have a family-oriented statement, a business related one, a spiritual one and so on. Here though, I will focus on the professional one.
Generally speaking, there are three components that I believe make a good mission statement: Who, What and Why.
Who – You should start by saying who you are. How you define yourself. What – Say what is that you do. Why- This one is probably the most important part – why are you doing what you’re doing.
So, take it for a spin! As for me, I my professional mission statement is:
I am front-end developer who writes innovative code for a remarkable user experience.
Today I have been working on building a mobile version for a flash based site. To break it down — the main site of the company I work for was built 3 years ago. Back then, when the blue-prints were laid out, it was hard to believe that Flash would be ‘booted out’ by the mobile world and the result of this was a flash website.
The site itself looks amazing, art-wise. The obvious issue though is that it is not mobile friendly, to say the least. If I had my way in this scenario, I would completely eliminate the main site and instead build out a responsive-design based website. Since time and budget are major factors in this case – it was decided to go with a mobile version for the site as oppose to a full-blown new website.
In my opinion, jQuery Mobile is the way to go. This framework is very easy to use and manipulate. It comes with a few built-in themes that are easy to customize but I found it more fun to create my own. This project is still in the works and I will make sure to post a link to the mobile beauty when it’s done!
I’m currently working on a website for a client in NYC. It is to be launched by the end of February and I look forward to post the new link here when I’m done.
The project started as a design hand-down to which I applied a few minor tweaks. After the client was happy with the layout, we moved on to the more exciting part of the project — Skinning!
I developed the website on Joomla 1.7 content management system, creating the new theme using HTML5 and CSS/jQuery combination. The site includes custom modules and plugins that I have developed from the ground-up. One example of such is a Facebook integration module. This will make it possible for my client to share her web pages on Facebook and will also enable her fans to post comments on selected sections of her website.
It is always fun to see how a project develops and comes down to a happy ending.
