We finally cleaned up our blogs and progress updates systems. This is exciting as it gives us a good foundation for pushing out content on a more frequent basis. Our initial blog, written by David, covers his experiences using AI assisted development to build out some features of this platform. Stay tuned for more of this as we have fallen in love with the technology.

We spent some time cleaning up the My Account section. We added color theme switching, which is found in a new section called My Account Settings. This can be accessed from within the My Account Details page. If you see any crazy colors that don't make sense in a theme, please reach out and let us know. More settings will be added over time to give you more control over your experience.

We also added a My Addresses section to the My Account page. This serves as your address book and allows you to establish billing and shipping addresses for your account. It also includes initial Address Validation using the USPS API. We will be adding more verification providers over time, including UPS and FedEx. This will allow us to verify addresses for orders and shipments, moving us closer towards having a fully functional merch store. Give it a try and see what you think. More work can be done around showing verification errors but for now, it is sufficient.

A standard set of service offerings has been added to the website. These include software development, photography, consulting, and project management. Each service page includes a brief description and a form to submit inquiries. We plan to expand on these pages in future releases, adding more detailed information and perhaps even some pricing structures. For now, think of it as a placeholder to get feedback on the concept and functionality.

As we were creating the first of the service inquiry forms, the one on the Photography service page, we realized that we needed a better way to handle forms. Just like that, the Informational Form was created. A config-driven form system that is fully integrated from rendering to validation to submission to persistence. It uses conditional rendering to show/hide fields based on user input... all driven through the config file. This included the removal of the existing Contact forms and then rebuilding them using the new config system. We were then able to quickly add the 4 service inquiry forms. Whether you like the astetics or not, this is an example of the type of thoughtful and practical engineering that goes into our work. We think they look great as well but you can judge for yourselves.

In order to justify our credentials for our service offerings, we added a resume link to the about pages. This provides a more professional look into our backgrounds and helps lend more authenticity to the projects being delivered. Hopefully building trust with our users and potential clients.

Overall, we are very pleased with how the site is coming together. There is still much work to be done, but we are making big progress. We are excited to share our progress and get your feedback. Until next time! Enjoy the rest of your summer!