So Long, Farewell … – Life, the Universe and Everything

This post has a back story. Is’s not too long, only a few years. But I’m afraid this is the third and final chapter of a fun yet unfulfilled website.

Part 1: Little Gifts
Part 2: Crash and Burn: the death of idea #173…

And there I was: I’d tweaked the layout, added more artists and sellers, played with the colours, and even got a logo designed by my girlfriend at the time. And then I forgot about it and started doing other things that didn’t involve being in front of screen until it was time for Christmas shopping when it popped back into my mind. Which is fine, but it means that it’s unlikely to grow the way I envisioned, it won’t introduce these local creators and artists a wider audience, it won’t become a hub. Grand ideas yet coupled with an unfortunate lack of interest in spending the time getting it going exactly how I want and making sure it works smoothly.

So it’s going. I posted on Facebook that if anyone fancies taking it over they should let me know, but by the time this post is published it’ll probably be gone. As a memorial to the good times we had, I thought I’d post some pics and ideas of what was and where I dreamed it might go.

I could never work out the code to be able to change the tagline background from white to something else, so it just stuck up in the top corner there like a sore thumb. I also couldn’t get the logo anywhere at the top near the site name, let alone decide which logo to use.

I was really happy with the design my girlfriend came up with, and there were more colour options too, yet I couldn’t get any of them in the right place on the site to see how it looked and then play with colours. I must have spent almost three hours fiddling with settings, desperately trying to change the right bit of code in the right place the right amount. And in the end I went and had a bath and read a book. And then they killed Ned Stark so I went to the pub. Looking back now, red and grey would have been good colours, but I think I was also thinking about changing the colour scheme entirely, depending on the logo. I’m not a designer, so lots of time was spent umming and ahhing without much progress being forthcoming.

The idea was that you could either use the search box, or browse the tiles to pick one you wanted to look at. Originally each tile had a brief description and some tags to help you see what they did, and then broader categories as a helpful start point. I also spent ages narrowing down the Categories to help the search function, and then decided that the ‘tags’ would be better used for location as it had started spreading outside the centre of Cambridge. You can see the ratings received as well, in case that was something you cared about, or again wanted inspiration, or just wanted to ensure you were getting something of god quality.

When you clicked on a tile you’d get taken through to the page where it had more details, a link to their actual website, and also reviews by people who had bought something from them. As you can see from Laura’s below, I was the only one who had commented (as I was probably the only one using it), but I liked the idea.

The next monster headache was trying to get the picture to actually take you to their website. I had a link in there too, but really wanted the main eye catcher to be a link. Could I manage it? Could I heck! More hours fruitlessly spent playing with options and asking Google for help.

The basic premise worked though. And so that it’s not all lost, I’m going to amalgamate all the info into one blog post here, so that at least in the future I still have access to the information I collected. Go check out some of the cool local creators and give them your support.

—– Edit —-
Just before posting this, I had a small tug of my heart strings and decided to see one last time if I could find a friendly person to join up with me and do battle with WordPress on my behalf. So ‘Little Gifts’ may yet survive, but also might sink without another word. If you’re interested in helping keep it going and growing let me know soon.

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