Singapore Web Designer5 days after the debut » AEN—Designer & Consultant

5 days have passed, since the debut of AEN DIRECT. I have never felt so good meddling around with my own site. The last time I used WordPress was more than 2 years ago when it was still version 1.5. There were no themes and everything was done with index.php and CSS.

After building the theme for designsojourn.com, I became really excited about WordPress 2.0.5 and the current multitude of available plugins online. I felt I could build something really nice and so I started developing a week ago.

when you have a solid concept and when you have the confidence, it all falls into place real quickly

From the sketch pad to Photoshop to Dreamweaver to a theme, it took less than 3 days. That’s what happens when you have a solid concept and when you have the confidence, it all falls into place real quickly. As I am finishing with the theme, I discover more and more fantastic plugins and I had to change the markup of the theme several times before I end up with something almost final. In fact I am still editing stuff right now, fine-tuning it to perfection.

Although it is not finalized, I have already began to submit the site to many CSS galleries after the 3rd day, while stamping out validation errors, browser issues and so on. Fortunately, for the past 5 days, out of all the galleries I submitted AEN DIRECT to, some accepted. First, on the 17th, was CSS Mania, bringing lots of traffic to the site as I witness a new high in my Google Analytics stats. Next came Screenfluent and Screenalicious. Then I see several people bookmarking me on del.icio.us. It is a really nice feeling to know that your work is being appreciated. On the 18th, W3C Sites and CSS Heaven showcased AEN DIRECT followed by a review in Dark Eye. I was also noted in CSS Import on the day. The next days from the 19th to the 20th, I saw myself in The Daily Slurp which is the core of Design Melt Down. Today, I realized I am in CSS Collection, after an email from Meryl K. Evans, the owner of CSS Collection. I have submitted the site to a lot other galleries, so I hope I get more listings for the next couple of days.

Being an IE hater (IE6 caused a virus infection that nearly wiped out my hard drive, IE7 was so bloated and useless I went back to IE6), I did not optimize the site for IE. I only used Firefox and Safari. I realized a big percentage of my users are IE users. You can’t really blame the people for using IE, they are also victims of the evil monopoly, so I did my work and fixed some float and margin problems with IE, for the sake of those who are still trapped in the IE dogma, hoping one day they will be liberated. I had to add an extra div though. An extra div just for the sake of accommodating some useless bloatware browser which you cannot even remove for goodness sake, sad.

This week is not only about fixing errors. I experimented with tricks and code I learned from wordpress.org and other sites. So far I added a Error 404 page (you can try going to http://aendirect.com/fake-broken-link/ to see it in action), a top search option (click search at the top of the page to access a sliding Ajax shelf containing the search form), integrated coComments into the commenting system and wrote some articles on Web Design Copyright Infringement, Tachikoma Snaps and Beautiful Peripherals.

My Technorati ranking has jumped from over 1 million in the beginning to 821,878. Hurray!

That’s it for this update. Do continue to support AEN DIRECT. I will do my best to include more of my works in the portfolio section, improve my writing and create better articles that will interest you. All feedback are appreciated.

I got back this post with the help of the web host. I like to thank Eric from Focushub.com for his assistance. I take back my nasty comments earlier.

I spent 2 hours writing this post and the server threw me a 406 error, every thing’s lost. Totaling all the bad experiences with this host, it simply is the most rotten web hosting I have ever used. I will switch to a better host, any recommendations will be appreciated. For your information, my host is focushub.com, Amen.