I have been incredibly busy this year with work, personal projects and family life. Here are just a few updates on work and some personal projects:
Sunglasses
In May I bought a new pair of sunglasses. I found it to be quite a daunting process as when I buy something, I research it thoroughly. I like to buy items that are good quality, serve my needs and ideally do more than 1 thing.
My main criteria was for the sunglasses to give good protection, so I could see well without squinting, when I was driving or walking in sunny conditions. They also had to look reasonable - not something that Elton John would wear.
I had seen some sunglasses with strong magnets, so you could clip them at the top of your t-shirt with no concern that they would fall off - I'm very surprised that hardly manufacturer does this.
I spend several hours researching on websites and YouTube videos, starting with the lens types, then the frames, then the price. Along the way, I discovered tools like the Oakley frame selector, which takes a photograph of your face and suggests which frames would suit you best.
As I found the process quite difficult and time consuming, I decided to write an article '5 Easy Steps to Choosing the Right Sunglasses', which I'm actually very proud of.
Work
As an IT consultant (SAP BASIS Administrator/Architect/Team Lead), I jump around between clients and roles. I have been with my current client (public healthcare sector in Scotland) for 1.5 years and have enjoyed it. For me personally, it has been one of the best projects I've been on as I know what I've had to do, I've spent a lot of time helping others in the team and I got to take on the role of 'Cutover Manager' for the first trial cutovers. I can't go into detail in public, but I'll say that the management from all parties involved has not been good - a common theme across most projects I've worked on in my career as a consultant. I updated my personal 'business' website PerformIT.
Wife's Website
I migrated and updated the website Great to Say to Cornish Flora for my wife Rebecca, who for the past 2 years, has been selling items on Etsy. She started selling soaps and room sprays and now sells cards (e.g. Christmas and birthday cards) and calendars made from:
Seed paper - paper that contains plant seeds that you can grow
Poo paper - paper made from the fibre of elephant/donkey/other poo
The Great to Say website resided on Netlify, which used to be free. Now it is no longer free, I run Cornish Flora on Cloudflare Pages, which is a new, free and the same workflow as Netlify - i.e. I develop the site in Visual Studio, do a 'Git push' to GitHub, then it automatically pushes to Cloudflare Pages. It's all very fast.
OKZest
Over the year, my brother Kevin and I have been developing a new website called OKZest. This allows people to add dynamic text on top of images, for use in emails, websites and social media. Adding personalised text on images increases the click rate and ROI of emails.
I am okay at HTML and CSS, but Kevin is a C# .net developer so does all the clever development bits.
We are in the process of redesigning the home page to make it clearer what the proposition is and who we are marketing it to. We are going to narrow the marketing to email marketers, to try to build an audience there. Once we have an audience, we can widen the marketing - as the service really can be used by a wide range of people. We have also got personalised imaging to twitter individuals working.