Easter Blues

Unless you’re in retail, holidays seem to be universally bad for business. Everyone, and I mean everyone I’ve been working for became magically unreachable this past week due to the one-two punch of St.Patrick’s day and Easter.

“No, I haven’t mailed the check yet.”

“No, I haven’t looked at the proofs.” ‘

“No, I haven’t checked any email today.”

Are you kidding me? I’ve got a body that needs feeding here! Needless to say, the whole thing has caused me some stress. Instead of sitting around panicking about it, my wife and I decided to enjoy the weekend and really take a holiday. I’m hoping Monday will bring clients back into a productive mood.

Besides enjoying Easter, I’ve been dabbling with PHP so that I can begin configuring a shopping cart for one particular client. It’s incredible to me how much of my time is spent trying to furiously learn new concepts to deliver what people are asking for. It feels exactly like being in school, except now I get paid for doing my homework. The continual personal expansion is one of my favorite aspects of this sort of work. As a designer, I’ve always shied away from code, but more and more I’ve realized there’s no way around it: good design requires programming. I don’t work for a firm, so I can’t rely on the guys down the hall. I have to know this stuff. Once you decide to learn it it’s really not that bad. The confusing thing is that I’m trying to comprehend both Actionscript 3 and PHP (along with databases in general). It’s taking me about twice the time to complete projects (I never bill for research time) but the long term benefits are worth it. People demand flexible pages with complex data, and customizable pages are a huge feature to be able to offer. My skills are slowly developing from pages that might as well be in print, towards truly interactive design. As usual, I’m impatient with my progress.

Another issue I’m trying to comprehend is choosing a platform to base shopping carts on. My host (Bluhost) offers Agoracart installation for free. This open source platform might do the trick.  Teh problem is, open source programs tend to be bad for beginners and require much more knowledge to get rolling.  I have a colleague that uses Cartweaver and seems to like it. It carries a $300 price tag, but is designed to work within Dreamweaver. As I work through the project, I’ll let you know what I end up doing.

Happy Easter!