Tonight recieved a new order , this time to design a vbulletin template for a gaming site. I think i am going to like designing / templating for this website. As a child , i was always into playing PC Games . Our new customer , owns / operates more than one gaming forum and somewhere along talking about the work, we dwelved into the genres of games each of us likes or rather liked . I have an idea that the client might be younger than me , and it was quite funny when he asked how old i am

Nevertheless , it is a perfectly valid question , as i am still kept hanging by an outsourced programmer who has been delaying for quite a long time on one invisionboard module i had got from him.

During tonights chat , the client mentioned that his idea of a gaming forum skin compares to IGN.com . Now , anyone running a gaming forum , obviously looks up to IGN – be it for the popularity , the look and feel or the functionability. However what they forget often , i believe is that IGN doesnt use any particular forum software but is built upon totally custom coded scripts from what i know . So often it is and will be much more flexible and maleable .

For many months , i have always wanted to do what we are doing now, i.e designing templates and skins. Over all these times earlier, i have come across various alternative sites… some of them having very good customisations and some having a good amount of skins. Since we are still at the beginning, i doubt if our works can yet be called good customizations, and also since our workforce is as of yet limited, we don’t have a good number of templates / skins either.

However , i am also having the dilemma … what to aim for , quantity and quality ? We have just started to sell … so i don’t have a good enough understanding which will help in selling more and thus making better money . As i have seen, as of yet making just CSS or colour changes can be done pretty quickly , but integrating designs differently does take a bit of time . I think , for now i will go and hunt for more inspirations …. not just design wise , but also from the business point of view.

Another blog , now this time on phpcafe Quite frankly i have not been much of a prolific blogger lately .  But i realy think this is a blog which should be there . After all , quite a bit of stuff is happening and quite a but i have got planned for phpcafe as a service website .  For long i had dreamt of opening a skinning shop and a service for design and development of open source scripts / php scripts programming .  I wont say , we have reached any landmark as yet , but at least we have made some noticeable progress .

Now is that supposed to be a joke , you may ask lol ; to be quite frank i am not sure yet how much will what we have done till now measure up in line with any marured skin developers / designers , thats why i say …. little doubtfully , we have not reached any landmark . However , we allready have a few clients in hand allready with projects delivered , too .

Since this is an update , so it would be just to mention that we have worked quite nicely on 2-3 osCommerce customisation projects , some in-house blog headers , and currently doing a project for a client with request for vbulletin templates.