ICodeLayouts.com Coming Soon

I am finally going to put one of my oldest domains to use. Its just been hard getting back into the working mode ever since I came back from Europe and I think its time to get some things rolling again for me.

I am announcing the start of I Code Layouts. Simply put, I will be coding web layouts and offering other web layout services such as PSD to WordPress conversions and PSD to xHTML conversions. The expected turnaround for these projects are generally a day or two and sometimes they are a lot quicker.

As usual, web standards are coming into play and all the layouts spit out by my trusty dreamweaver and photoshop will be xHTML and CSS valid. I am hoping to get a few solid clients to use my service and then expand out into something larger.

I am planning on developing a client system with icodelayouts.com and my other domain icodescripts.com which is currently expired… That reminds me to go renew it asap before it gets deleted. Anyways, with the client system, I will be using a custom panel where my clients can access either site and manage projects and such. It might be apart of my CMS that possibly will be released publicly or for a small fee.

One of my good friends, and recent clients Ryden Rizzo will be whipping up a layout for me. Hoping to get the site fully launched and serving by the end of the week. Already served one client under this name, only a handful more to go!

And if you ever forget just remember… I Code Layouts.

I hate Expression Engine… alot

A week or so ago, I had the privilege to work on David Pache‘s website: [dache.ch]. I had to do a few CSS fixes here and because his website was not rendering properly in certain browsers (Internet Explorer) and he also wanted some additions done to his site.  He wanted a blog section to be added in which he calls the dacheboard and some other categories for his portfolio.

All seemed pretty good and this was my first time working on Expression Engine [EE].  I had a hard time because I am so use to WordPress and all its glorious simplicity and I stumbled trying to perform the most simple tasks such as adding a new category or working with their own template language system.

While it was pretty interesting, they made everything too hard and I had to learn this new expression language in order to get posts from a certain category and so forth.  On the other hand with WordPress; some PHP knowledge is necessary to do what you need to do but that isn’t a problem since that is what I have been using for the past 4 or 5 years.

Another thing that I found to be problematic with EE is that the template system was inside the administration panel and I couldn’t use FTP or dreamweaver in order to make direct edits to the website.  There was an option to save the templates as files onto the server but that just gave problems and I ended up getting no where.

On a plus side, EE seems to have its own userbase which is probably as great or even greater than WordPress and they seem to know what they are doing to keep their clients coming back.  I can’t complain because its just not my niche to work in and I don’t plan on doing that any time soon.  The documentation of their web application seems to be pretty good and I can’t say that I didn’t learn something new.

Also, David has some very nice work in his portfolio and you should check it out some time.  His work covers a lot of different areas such as logos and prints and I wish him the best of luck with the success of his career.  In case you missed that, its @ dache.ch

– End Rant