I meant to announce June’s site earlier, but I’ve been busy. For June I will focus on my biggest weakness as a website builder - design. The goal is to spruce up with blog with a cool, trendy look and hopefully learn some tricks I can use in the future. Coming up with and implementing a design will probably take up most of the month, but I would also like to improve the project management tools.

I have been using ProgressFly as a way to track how far along a site is, but it is limited. Basecamp seems like a great web based project management tool, but it’s probably over kill for what I’m doing. Plus I like having the information available to the readers blog, rather than in some password protected site. I really just want a pluggin where I can enter some tasks and maybe the estimated time to complete. Then by checking off a task the progress meter will automatically update. The nature of this experiment may cause the project meter to jump around as I complete tasks, then add more to the list, depending how much of the month is left.

I also want to keep track of the time I spend on each site. I work a regular 40 hour a week job, I do some consulting on the side and I have a wife and newborn baby, so it can be hard finding the time to work on these sites. I would estimate I spent 30-40 hours on RSStalker. Dealing with the XML from Amazon, then generating CSS and debugging/caching the feeds took a lot of time. The widget probably took me 15-20 hours mostly getting used to writing widgets and getting it to look the way I wanted, since laying out a widget is entirely different then laying out a website. StadiumTraveler.com was around 15 hours of work. These are all rough estimates, but I would like a way to keep better records going forward.

The project management pluggin probably won’t take more then a few hours, which should allow me to devote a fail amount of time to the design. I’m not really sure what direction I’ll be going in just yet. I know I want something “Web 2.0″ish, but not just a copy of whats out there. Sort of an evolved Web 2.0 look. For example rather than the rounded corners that are so prevalent, I might try an angled corner.

As always I’ll try to post updates on my progress.

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