Updates and Upgrades
Been a while since I last posted and I aplologize for that. Been a real whirlwind around the ‘ol office here lately so the blog has gotten the “last thought” treatment. Let’s catch up.
The Star Wars site has been coming along real good with lot’s of graphical updates to their forums, photo galleries and main site(s). Wish I could say I had a hand in a lot of it but it would be a lie as all my part concerned was the moving of the databases and some other backend work. They do have one great graphics guy in Adam Johnsey though. He’s fearless and knows what he wants in the look and feel of their sites. Go here for a sneak peek: http://bamarebels.com
Added some new gallery pages for a customer of mine here in the Birmingham, Alabama area that wanted to update their inventory. Southern Plant Designs is a company that arranges to install plants, planters and so forth in various companies entry ways, offices and more plus takes care of them for you. Jeanne and her husband do awesome work and it shows in the way they take care of the plants and how they arrange them to compliment the surroundings. Go here to check out their new offerings (Click on the Gallery link) http://southernplantdesigns.com
Been real busy at several forums where I am a volunteer moderator as well. These forums deal with a customer base for web hosts. A lot of the content has to do with helping them to work out issues they might be experiencing with say, forms, code for a particular page, email problems, application integration, etc. You really learn a lot by the interaction there.
My wife and I recently got back from our vacation to Mexico. We took a cruise to Cozumel that was awesome. If you’re ever there, visit Palmeros. It’s one of my favorite restaurants there. It offers open air seating, ceiling fans to keep you cool and the menu is an offering of their country’s finest.
Lastly, I finally got around to updating my own site at wilsonswaydesigns.com. It’d been a long time coming but as the old adage goes: “a plumber’s house has the worst pipes”…mine had an outdated look and feel. At least I felt it did. So, I finally got around to giving it a face-lift.
I’m also going open source with my work these days too. The open source movement has lot’s to offer us freelance designers that may not want to fork out the big bucks for the super expensive software that’s available these days. My last investment in Dreamweaver MX set me back a bit when I bought it. But seeing as the open source alternatives available today are much better they are getting my attention instead of the costly versions of Adobe’s or Microsoft to name a few.
Take Quanta Plus or the Bluefish Editor or even Kompozer. All three are very capable apps that offer much to the freelance web designer. Also The GIMP is a good tool for image editing and with Inkscape Vector Graphics Editor you have a good set of tools for image and graphics work.
I’ll try to keep the blog more updated seeing as things are beginning to slow down somewhat. In the meantime, keep rooting for the U.S. in the Olympics. I know it’s been an interesting one this time for sure. 
