In more or less one week I hammered out this website for Bean Extreme to manage his artist and MC bookings. I used the Twenty Twenty Two WordPress theme, since I wanted to do a white opener and then go into black. You can visit the site here.
Unique Features
The most unique feature I added to the website was reasonably complicated mailto links on the booking images. To do these, it is best to first make them up in a text file and then paste the links into the image link.
Font Magic
I used the standard theme fonts, but thinned them out fully to take the focus off the letters and rezone it to the content. Somehow I think heavy fonts are old style and take up too much space on a mobile device.
Knowledge Gained
I had a unique black area at the top of the home page and couldn’t figure out what it was. I used the Document Overview function to see what blocks are in the page and discoverd it was a simple paragraph, which I could delete in the Document Overview.
Block Editor
I am really getting into the WordPress Block Editor. My best tip for using it would be to browse through all the available blocks. Chances are 99% that whatever you want to do can be managed with one of the unique blocks in the Library.
Enjoy your web design and web development and tread lightly.
Being a digital nomad has challenges and lots of joy. Currently I am camping in my Jeep Grand Cherokee and work from my store room about 20km away. My commute passes one of the coolest beaches on False Bay. I stop there for breakfast and to plan my day. I meet good people there and most of them ask what you do. My answer of course is, “Websites”.
Jeep Grand Cherokee by False Bay
Challenges As Digital Nomad
One of my challenges is to have good access to the Internet when I want to work. I work with WordPress and Ruby On Rails. In Simon’s Town the signal is really not great everywhere. I think it is connected to the village hugging a small strip between the mountains and the ocean. In the southern side the signal can just drop off whenever it feels like it. At the beach I have good signal and there I catch up with messages and communication.
Having a good place to work is a challenge sometimes. I can work from coffee shops and restaurants, but it is never guaranteed to be quiet there. I thought of working in the local library and will look into it. At my store room in Sun Valley it is more ideal. The signal is good there and I can make coffee on my gas stove. I set up a desk there for work and run it off a 300W, 110V inverter I bought many years ago in Canada.
When the weather improves, I will be able to set up a table under a nice shade tree and work from camp. I have done it before and it is quite inspiring. I can go into a creative space when working in nature. I tend to work more or less from noon until about 8pm. It is more or less 8 hours and it works for me.
Jeep Cherokee in the Richtersveld.
Joy In The Present
My Jeep is not living in the garage any more. I used to drive her only two to three times a week. As digital nomad I live with my Jeep all day long and power my office off her 80Ah AGM battery. I get to wake up with bird song and the calming ocean down below. The sunrise is beautiful each morning. I feel more alive and get plenty of excercise.
When the weather improves, I will repair and pitch my tent again. I will be able to work from there. A storm took it out one night when we had gale force winds. My tent has a couple of tears and broken anchor points. I have worked from my tent before and it works quite well.
I get to go to the beach every day. When I was working from home, I would go to the beach only a few times a month. I meet more people than before. I only met people in the queue at the supermarket, dashing in quickly for some groceries.
Jeep Life
Lioness, my Jeep Grand Cherokee is my 10th Jeep. She was built in Graz, Austria in late 2011 and she is a really good workhorse. I have not had any issues to date with her, except for some of the gas struts now going a bit lame. She has the 5.7 liter HEMI engine and can be a bit thirsty in town.
Springbokkie was my last Jeep Cherokee and we have done some good miles together. I had to let her go. She was rusting up on the sidewalk and I did not get the time to repair an issue with a sensor, which prevented her from starting. I only had enough time to take her out to the bush once or twice a year.
I hope to hit the road again soon. Holiday season is coming and then I don’t really want to be in Cape Town. At the moment I am drumming up some business and it is picking up nicely. I am really enjoying the latest WordPress enhancements and they make the platform quite flexible.
Ideally I would like to get a Mercedes Sprinter van and kit her out nicely. I will be able to create a great office space and be more productive. Of course I can just get an A-Frame and tow Lioness behind the van. That would be The Life, right?
After almost two months in development, Purple Daisy Garden Design is ready for SEO. The challenge here was to let the site look cheerful. I also don’t know a thing about garden design and the processes involved. I relied a lot on my client to provide the content and explain to me how it all works.
Below is a screen capture of the entire home page. The idea was to allow continuous scrolling on a mobile device and gather all the information you require through scrolling. There is one tap involved on a button when you want to obtain contact information. You can go to the site to see it for yourself.
Many thanks to my client Esté for being patient with me and taking the effort to provide content updates in such a clear manner. We have done all the communication using WhatsApp and a few emails. Text and voice messages work quite well.
As with all websites it is never complete. Esté is subscribed to our monthly maintenance plan and we will soon add a portfolio page. Of course I still want to do some spacing tweaks, but I will resist for now.
Cedit: Many thanks to Page Saver WE Firefox Plugin for such a dandy web page saver. Donate to them if you can.
For quite some time I was a bit skeptical about AI. What if the world gets taken over by AI robots? What if an AI Robot gets elected as president? Maybe that’s not a bad idea, since AI is developed by geeks who are geniuses and they usually have good hearts (often being on some spectrum). What if your self driving car fries a chip while you try to get some fries or you are busy eating your fries while the car is driving? I saw an article about an AI driven Battle Tank today. Its worrying me. This whole chip thing is a big deal. Go watch the Asionometry channel on YouTube about that.
A Gentle Introduction
I started out by asking Meta AI on WhatsApp to draw me a Jeep Build. It came out quite nicely. The response is a visual image and a nicely worded description of the image. Meta AI also added a nice list of equipment to include as well as handy tips like making sure you get the measurements correct. You can see the Jeep Build designed by Meta AI on my White Jeep Instagram profile. The LED strip lighting and the surrounding landscape is also commendable. There is even a depth of field photographic effect, also referred to as Boca.
SEO Keywords
I am using Yoast SEO at the moment for this website, but I don’t like all the advertising and attempts to sell you the paid version. Part of the paid Yoast is also AI keyword generation. So I thought I would ask Meta AI for some keywords for SEO optimization. The AI engine responded with three categories of keywords to use in website pages. I really liked it and will apply the keywords on this website soon.
Conclusion
So AI can be handy as a source of information and as a teaching tool. I suppose a lot depends on the learning algorithms used for the neural networks operating the AI engine. It definitely can be really cool or a disaster if the wrong attitude is applied in the learning process. Almost like a kid growing up with swearing parents who surprises their teacher at school. I have a tiny worry that the big corporations will get us addicted to it and then make us pay for it later, much like the sugar industry in the previous century. Billions of Dollars are currently being invested in AI and of course there needs to be a return on any investment. Tread lightly.
Perhaps the main purpose of a website is to show your business or offerings when potential customers or visitors search for something specific (that unique thing you do) on the Internet.
Getting In Touch
A website can tell people how to get hold of you to collaborate, buy your product, arrange for a quotation or simply see what you have on offer.
News Or Blog
A news or blog section is where you post about your latest projects, or post valuable information about your industry. You can do this yourself and it as easy as social media posting.
External Links
On your website you can bring all your on-line activities together and let visitors explore all the things you do and find you on the different social media and other platforms. You can embed videos and add links to your various digital footprints.
Search Engines
Most importantly, you need to be visible and registered with one or more search engine, so your site can be indexed and pop up on a search. Your content also helps. Google, for example, would rather list a cool site and not a crappy old-fashioned site.
Visitor Monitoring
With a website you can monitor your search hits and see how many visitors come to your website. You can see what search strings were used when the search engine lists you on a search result.
Metrics
With built-in site metrics you can see from where people are visiting your site, how long they stay on your pages and where do they go from each page. You can see who goes to the page that leads to a sale (some people call it a conversion).
Your Creative Space
A website is your creative space where you can express your talents, unique personality and views. You can monetize that thing you love doing all day.
Benefits And Value
A website can drive your business and pay for itself many times over. If all goes well, your sales will increase and your business will blossom like the little cactus above.
Welcome to Websites to go [for] Africa. I found my own sales dropped for my Hand Wash Reminder Alarms. After some inspection I found that everything SEO has changed and nobody is able to find me in a web search. Within a few weeks I studied SEO again and implemented what I learned. Without any advertising the phone started ringing and people started sending me email for sales inquiries.
Cork On The Ocean
A website is like a wine cork on the ocean without SEO. With billions of sites out there on the Internet your website must be known by the search engines. A webbot will then trawl your site and fetch updates and keywords from it. This way your site gets indexed, which is a smart way of extracting your website offerings from a huge database of websites.
Look Good Out There
The most popular search engine, Google, doesn’t like offering people crappy websites in their search results. This leads to an unpleasant search experience and is egg on Google’s face. It is better to have a mobile friendly modern site with some nice eye candy. Quick loading also helps a lot. Your website needs to load quick and consume as little as possible data. We have the tools to check all of that.
Leopards at Bain’s Kloof Pass
The photo above was taken early in the morning entering Bain’s Kloof Pass. Leopards are nocturnal and shy. They are hard to find, yet they are there. I decided to turn back and wait at the Breede River Bridge a few kilometer away. I don’t want any Leopard to bite me unexpectedly. When the sun came up, I went back in and had an amazing morning exploring the pass. If you really want to experience a place, stop and linger for some hours. There’s a lot to see and it only comes to you after a while. It was cloudy and raining, so I took a nap in the back of the Jeep to wake up with beautiful sunshine. Try it, you might like it.
