I have just purchased and updated the hosting service offered by freed virtual servers, I currently host my site with them asnd now M-bellish will run from the same serivce. I have looked into many differen hosting services and packages from many differentproviders. I have no need for dedictaed servers with the small to mid range businesses that i create websites for, and i feel it is somewhat a myth that virtual or (shared) servers are unreliable at least that is what i have found in my experience. The company freevirtualservers offer a competitive rate and a great deal for your money. However most importantly they offer a fantastic customer service and when on the odd accoasion problems have arisen they have been first class in resolving them.

One of the mos Impressive features of the hosting package is the magnitude of free services offered within them. I ma most impressed with finding owrdpress included in the package. Although this could be dowloaded easily elsewhere to have all the setup taken care of in one place makes life a lot easier.

I have noticed of late that a majority of designers have begun using wordpress as a foundation to their site builds. This seems somewhat bizzare when you first contemplate it, however i think wordpress being of a solid open source background would not be a bad template to work from, however i struggle with the concept of charging a client good money to create a website using an already laid out template which i had not built. What also concerns me is the use of wordpress, which first and for most is a blogging tool, to carry out the tasks of picture galleries and so on. My resolve is to use wordpress as a tool for news pages and blogs, but not to rely on it whole heartedly. Thus M-bellish will operate a news feature which will have wordpress grafted into the design and skinned so that an average user would have no idea it was even there. I will also build in controls to get to and from the wordpress back end via the admin access area therefore making the whole procees of updating the site more centralized and user focused.

M-bellish has been the primary focus of my efforts to date. I have taken longer to develop this site than usual as i have decided to refine my techniques. I was unsatisfied with my directory mapping, so took the time to re evaluate the use of include files and folders, to make the site more manageable for future developments. I have found the most successful method is to use the include header and footer then include and framing divs outside of these files, thus making designing the page elements much much easier to control.

Another large portion of my time has been taken up with getting to grips with jQuery – if you have the opportunity and an understanding of javascript this is well worth learning as it does exactly what it says on the tin! The validation for the site is all being carried out using the bassistence platform. I have never been fond of js alerts and jquery has offered the perfect solution to this issue.

Aside from this i am slowly creating a highly versatile tool set for future projects. It has taken some time, which includes a contact form, registration form, image gallery and now a very robust db configuration include once required i need only change 3 variables to gain complete access to databases. This may not sound overly interesting, but trust me it saves a lot of repetition and horse work.

One great find this week was a website called basecamp. I’m normally not such a fan of online task orientated apps, but this one works really well. You simply sign up for an account (which is free) then create a project modulate you tasks and create to – do lists from this which can be refference and checked off as appropriate. Very handy indeed.

This is the first post of theodin.co.uk and as such would like to warmly welcome those of you reading. This blog will serve as a platform to update information about what theodin is doing, involved with and future developments. If you like what you see and want to hear more, please feel free to pop back from time to time or add me to your feed.