On my plate right now I am designing two websites for family and redesigning Crimson Haven. One project is And I’m happy for them all. Doug Watson Digital is the one for my uncle by the name of, you guessed it, Doug Watson. If you happen to be interested in employing an extremely talented artist for teaching, composting, video game art, or whatever you should definitely check out his site and give him an email.
For an entirely different crowd there is Splitpin Engineering Services which is the website for my dad, Dave Watson. At this very second it’s just a fancy online business card, but come the weekend there will be a new feature added, a digital parts manual. We came up with this idea while my dad was complaining that one of the most time consuming parts of his job was when somebody called his antique aircraft spare parts business saying something to the effect of "I need the whatchyamacallit that fits between the fiddly thing and that other gidget. My original plan was to just make one simple database and have a page where you could pick a manual, pick an item of interest from the manual and be given a diagram. Then you type in a number from the diagram and you get a part number complete with name and description. It all seemed so simple, till my friend Roo decided to have a day long conversation with me about the benefits of having a nice relational database. Which, to this day, I am not using any of the benefits he listed to me. But hey, how could I turn down an opportunity to try something needlessly complicated in the hopes that I’ll be glad for the practice in the future.
In return for doing these two sites I’ve managed to lay my hands on some very nice software and a touch of hardware which I most certainly could not afford if I were not a student. (more…)
