We’re back from Lisbon. Well, I should say that I am back. Jan is currently in England and I am hopelessly lost without her. I just don’t know what to do with myself. I spent all day yesterday on the computer. No joke. All day. I’m finishing up a couple web projects I’ve been working on before I start my job with Clean Break next week.

Derek and I have been working on a redesign for Revista Toldo for the past year (as you’ll see, they desperately need it). No joke. A year. It should have been a two month project but the client is absolutely hopeless at getting us the necessary content and doesn’t seem to be in much of a rush, either. We sometimes waited over two months to get a response from an email. I’ll let you know when we make the new site public. This is the same guy for whom we redesigned Ibertoldo.com last year.

Apart from this, I just finished programming a web site for a friend of mine who is the lead singer for an amazing klezmer band here in Barcelona. The group is called Mashalá! (which means Congratulations! in Ladino, Turkish, and Arabic). I’m happy with the programming end of things – but it was a bitch to complete! Since there are four languages here, the site is made up of over 50 pages! Plus the designer (not Derek) was an absolute nightmare to work with. The site is entirely too reliant on graphics to load quickly (and search engines will never find it), I think it’s too small to read properly, the design elements were delivered to me in very web-unfriendly formats, and she didn’t even want to do her job half the time. But I made it work.

The only other web project I have on the horizon is my aunt Amy’s real estate website which I’m working on with my mate Bob (he’s the programming geek on this one). Amy has someone in LA to do the design and the initial mockups look promising. Once we sort out the technical challenges of integrating a comprehensive search engine from another real estate website we’ll be on our way. I have to send her an estimate today of how much it’ll cost her. That’s always a sensitive matter: mixing family/friends with business.