One Project Down – Many More to Go

Today I finally finished the website for my clients, Maid in Heaven Cleaning Services. It took a bit longer than I had wanted, but it’s done now! Before I was even able to finish that project, I got tacked onto a volunteer assignment for a long time idol of mine “Scooby” Werkstatt. Scooby operates and maintains a free fitness website targeted to people working out at home. I learned about Scooby after I finished a cycle of P90X and was looking for new direction. Little did I know that through using Scooby’s materials I would learn to think on my own and create workouts that were accesible and affordable to my needs.

Anyways, onto the nitty gritty: Scooby has been fighting a war against fitness scam artists who trick hundreds and hundreds of people into buying their products using absurd claims. These scam artists have large budgets that allow them to make their products very marketable and reach out to others. Since Scooby is running his gig alone, there is no budget, and marketing yourself becomes a lot harder! Scooby reached out to his community asking for help in which I wrote him a volunteer proposal as a way to give back for helping out me and many others.

The plan is very extensive including:

• Redesigning the website
• Using a clean backend
  • WordPress CMS with Catalyst Framework
• Search engine optimizing the website
• Streamlining platforms
  • Integrating Blogger blog into main page
• Migrating hundreds of pages of content
  • Cleaning up code, removing deprecated usage of tables and other code
  • Using HTML5 standards and CSS3

As you may be able to tell, there is a lot of work to be done! This is going to be an ongoing project which may very well take several months in order to be fully implemented, but the end result will be well worth it. It will also make Scooby’s life much easier once he grows accustomed to the WordPress WYSIWYG which is miles ahead of using DreamWeaver templates.

On other news, I am a week into my internship here at Stanford University’s Computer Science Security Lab. It is much different than I had been imagining. I’ve been learning lots of new programming languages (note: I am not going to school for computer science) such as Python, jQuery, and JavaScript (creating Firefox plugins using the JetPack SDK). So far it has been VERY challenging, but I’m learning a ton of unexpected information. Talk about a humbling experience when you are thrown into an unknown situation!

Maid in Heaven Cleaning Services: http://www.maidheaven.com
Scooby’s Current Website: http://www.scoobysworkshop.com
Beta version of the redesign: http://ph34rnet.fatcow.com/scooby