my portfolio

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: January 10th, 2011 | 0 Comments

Yesterday i completed my portfolio website; i have wanted to make this site for a long time and wanted to make sure i got it right. The way i look at this site is that i want to get business from it, so in order for that to happen i have to make it as appealing and professional looking as i can. A few years ago i managed to register my own name (Sean Lucas) as a domain name, i was never too sure as to what i would put on it, i just got the opportunity, so i registered it. Sometime last year i finally decided that it would best suit to host my portfolio, it’s a personal domain name so i thought it would be best to fill it with what i do, which is websites. It took me a long time to settle on this design, as of lately i have become very fond of simplistic sites, this is shown here with the design i created on my blog and also on the design i have made for my portfolio. While i was developing this site of the past few months on and off i was also working on getting good SEO onto the domain for the portfolio, i put up a little splash page with my name and email just so i could add in some SEO code, this proved very beneficial because i managed to get my portfolio domain up to number one spot i Google results (at least here in Ireland). Once i finished coding my website, i decided to put it onto the wordpress platform, i do this will almost all my websites and continued the tradition on with this one too. The main reasons why i wanted to use wordpress for my portfolio were the plugins that are available. On my portfolio i installed a cache plugin to speed up the site and i also installed a great contact form plugin, i also put on a few extra ones which help out with SEO. My portfolio has a lot of information on it that relates to me, i have an about page which will tell visitors all about who i am. The next page i have is my actual portfolio page, here you can see some of the websites i have created, i have some others but only decided to add in a few. The third page is services; here i said what i can do for you if you are looking to get a website. The last page is pretty much self-explanatory, it is the contact page, here you can send me an email using a form describing what you would like. I also added in a few social network links, i included my Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. I am really happy with how the site has turned out and i don’t expect to make too many changes to it for the next while, unless i am updating my portfolio page. You can take a look at my Portfolio here: www.seanlucas.com

May 2010 Review

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 20th, 2010 | 0 Comments

It has been a while since I last made a review post on how my blog is currently doing in relation to my work rate and what kind of traffic I am receiving. This review is for last month (May 2010). May this year was definitely a great month for me, I had been steadily building up my blog postings back to my old method of posting one a day and last month, May, I finally reached a posting rate which I am really happy with. Last month I made 26 blog postings, which is really good considering there is 31 days in May so I only missed out on 5 days in the whole month! :D Last month was my exams in college, and although I was studying away I made a good effort to get a blog post made each night. Here is a list of all of last month's blog posts:

31: Challenge begins tomorrow 30: my weekend, and the Turkish grand prix 29: a good web series 28: Brushing up on photoshop 27: newmovies.ie, where is it gone! 26: Clean slate 25: work begins on my new theme 24: and the weather continues 23: facebook Ahoy! 22: Really hot weather 21: No internet, and Google pacman 20: Finished my exams 19: Tomorrows exam 18: Three down, one to go 17: Setting myself a challenge 16: Monaco, what a race! 15: Online plans for the summer 14: Whats that song called? 13: Half way there 12: Now I have a bill phone 11: Started my exams today 09: Spanish Grand Prix – Can’t believe it 08: Marina and the Diamonds 07: Making a few changes 06: Google – A change in design 05: Exams approaching

Traffic to my blog last month has also been incredible, my traffic had dipped slightly towards the end of April, which was probably due to my lack of posts, but by making my regular posts last month I managed to bring my visitor count back up. Last month (May 2010) my blog received 12,161 unique visits with a total of 13,869 page views.  Not bad! If I compare this year's May traffic to last year's May (2009) traffic, there is a significant increase, last year I received 2,139 unique visits in May, so this year there was a 468.54% increase in traffic! So I am really happy with the way my blog is growing and hopefully I can keep up with the blog posts :D. I have also noticed that my RSS subscribers have also increased a lot since last year, last year I recall only having about one RSS Subscriber, but now I have about 37 on average each month, not bad! Maybe over the next few weeks I might be able to increase this count. I don't really have it too easy to subscribe to my RSS either so I will have to work on that! Maybe I will incorporate it into my new theme I am working on, if I ever get it finished! So for now I will list two ways that you can subscribe to my RSS feed, these two methods are either subscribing through a RSS reader such as Google Reader or you can subscribe by e-mail (by subscribing by e-mail, all my latest blog posts will be e-mailed to you between 11pm and 1 am GMT each day!). Just choose one of the options below! :D

Click here to subscribe to my RSS via a Reader

Click here to subscribe to my RSS via E-mail

Another thing I wanted to point out is what browsers my visitors use, the most popular one is Firefox! Which is great, just over 41% of my visitors use Firefox, the next most popular is Internet Explorer (if you use this I recommend you switch to either Firefox or Google Chrome), Internet Explorer makes up just over 36% of my visitors and then the third largest internet browser visitors use is Google Chrome which makes up just over 18% of the visitors.

New Apple iPhone 3G

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 9th, 2008 | 0 Comments

Its official Apple have just announced that on July 11th they will be releasing the new iPhone 3G. The amazing thing about this is that not just is there new features like 3G but the price has literally been slashed in half. You used to have to pay $399 (Approx €255)  for an 8gb iPhone and $499 (Approx €319) for a 16gb iPhone, but as of this July 11th you will now only have to pay $199 (Approx €127) for the 8gb iPhone 3G and $299 (Approx €191)  for the 16gb iPhone 3G.

The 8gb iPhone 3G will be available only in black however they will be releasing the 16gb iPhone 3g in black & white so there is more choice if you go for the 16gb. There is also a hint now that they will be releasing a new update for iTunes, this update will be version 7.7. This is required for the new iPhone 3G.

This new iPhone 3G was announced at the wddc 2008 today (June 8th 2008).

I think that when this new iPhone gets released i will definitely be buying it.