#aarfie

+ Sold the house and car at last. I’ll have all the banking and such sorted out by the end of this week. When everything is wrapped up it looks like I’ll be $40k in debt to the tax office back home. I would have ended up with twice that much in the bank if I hadn’t bought that fucken “investment” property. I’m not dwelling on it. Really I’m not.

+ Aarfie is getting consistent enquiries and I’m yet to put any time in to advertising. I’ve had enough work to keep me busy so far and I have no doubt I can make this thing successful. I’ve never worked for so little though. We should be in a position to start raising our prices next year, but at the minute it’s all about securing projects and fattening up the portfolio.

+ We’ve been throwing around some really exciting ideas for Aarfie projects lately. The challenge is to fit their development in to the schedule for the next 6 months, when the pressure is on to keep the money coming in.

Aarfie is finally officially live!

OK, so the site is done and I’m going to let it sit for a little while before taking it live. It gives me the opportunity to remove myself from it for a while and then carry out one last review with a little more objectiveness.

In the mean time, I would appreciate any feedback from anyone that has the time to check it out (yeah you!). Send me whatever you got; bugs, don’t-look-rights, don’t-like-its, don’t-get-its, I’d-change-this’s, this-aint-good-grammars’s, spelling-bads, and so on. Comment here or send email; whatever floats your boat.

If you do get a chance to look over it, feel free to click everything including sending forms. Also keep in mind that I’m trying to make everything as clear and concise as possible for a target customer that is not overly comfortable with web hosting and design; so if you have any ideas for explaining anything with more clarity, please let me know.

Check it out now.

p.s. This is what a visitor will see if they view the site with Internet Explorer 6 or older. It gave me great joy to create this page rather than screw around trying to make the entire site compatible. Great, great joy.

I think the site is almost done. Loads more work than I expected, but it should be ready for a preview tomorrow.

Feeling relieved.

I’m gonna go drink wine and eat those truffles that Jon is baking up.

Since Darren is content spending time in the studio, we’ve been getting some work done as well as some sight seeing. I nutted out this web-form (obviously the real pricing has been replaced with random figures) for ecopeko wholesale orders. It may not look like much, but if you view the source you’ll see just how much code goes into making such a thing work. And that doesn’t even include the additional php file that takes all the data, cleans it up and sends it to an email address in a presentable format.

It was a good learning experience, and I think I managed to make it idiot-proof enough without going overboard. You could still enter “7″ for your name for example, but I made the phone number and email address restrictions a little tighter.

There are a bunch of other checks running behind the scenes to prevent alphas in the quantity fields, decimal points where they shouldn’t be and so on. Form submission is also prevented until all required fields are completed.

On the email processing side I added functions to remove all zero fields, sort the data in a sensible order and split it in to sections with headers (“Contact Details”, “Shipping Address” and “Order Details”), so that the order confirmation is as neat as possible.