After creating, recreating and countless cycles of refining our own websites (me and my wife), we got a customer who wanted a personal website designed. (We aren’t pushing the web design (or SEO) side of the business, we just want it to grow naturally, as part of the general computer help and repair side of Computer Aid)

He had already purchased the domain name (dazx.com.au) and a hosting package from unlimited-space.com.

He wanted something like what he currently had with a free website hosting company, so we decided to go for a simple site (one html page, and the rest using the apps supplied by unlimited-space).

We decided to try frontpage, but eventually went back to using Nvu. We created a photo gallery using Coppermine, a joke section as a blog using WordPress, and a guestbook using ViPER.

Mandy wanted to create a great website, but given that this was a ‘budget’ website, I had to insist we tone down the extra features. Creating a consistent look and feel across all the applications was worth doing, but creating fancy navigation buttons, with a mouseover effect, was going too far. It would have cheapened our service (the equivalent of offering a Merc for the price of a Hyundai)… subsequent customers could expect similar service levels, which we cannot afford to deliver (given the huge amount of time it takes to design and customise).

Anyway, the customer is very pleased.

I did a handover (setup email, and gave instructions on how to update the contents of the website).

It all went very well.