Wow! what a busy week I have just had, I have barely been able to keep up with comments here and I’ve sorely neglected my blogging brethren by not popping in for a cup of tea, sorry about that everyone but I’ve been busy with some commercial projects for work which turned out to be great fun!

I have been working on some ecommerce sites and CMS scripts to get a ‘proof of concept’ site up for a client and it went really well, one of the proofs turned out so well that I think it may become the one that we use! (that’ll save some time when it comes to launch day!)

Part of the ecommerce research I did to see what would work led me to trying lots of different things, one of them being a simple wordpress theme with an added shopping cart which turned out to be a very simple and cheap solution. It worked really well and was up and running in a couple of hours so that got me thinking about writing a series of posts later explaining how to sell products direct from your blog with the minimum amount of fuss.

I also bought a book about AJAX called “The AJAX construction kit”. I bought it after browsing through it’s pages in the local book shop, a nice place where you can sit down and read through any of the books on display before you buy…. or do as I do and use the free wifi provided to get my PDA online and type in the ISBN number on Amazon and then order it for 1/3 of the price of the shop! (teehee)

So far it’s been a great read and I particularly like the way it teaches you how to do things with the construction kit rather than try and teach you every single nut and bolt of Javascript and PHP. It’s a much better way to learn how to get AJAX scripts running on your site and I can see some very useful plugins coming this way when I’ve finished the book. In fact, a way to get me to read more will be to share what I learn with a series of AJAX tutorials here!

I am also considering getting a professional redesign done for here, I think a few hundred dollars will get me a fine looking site. I’m not even sure what I want yet and I had to abandon my idea of doing it all myself since the new work projects came in. Anyone out there use a professional designer and could recommend them?