Darron Beetge

Bangkok Diaries

Darron — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 02:37:49 +0000

Bangkok Diaries started off as my personal blog, when I first moved from South Africa to Thailand, and later evolved into a reader submission site. In the early days the articles were merely my personal accounts of life in Bangkok. I updated as often as I could or whenever I noticed something interesting around me. After blogging for about a month, some readers started emailing me with their own stories about life in Bangkok and I decided to change the site and make it more of a community.

The site is powered by WordPress and I wanted to keep the design and navigation as clean as possible to encourage reader interaction. Advertisements were kept separate from the content and there are multiple navigation possibilities for finding your way around the site.

About a year ago I realized that I was not giving the site the attention that it deserved and decided to sell it on a popular expatriate forum here in Thailand. The response was overwhelming and I had found a buyer within hours.

The site is coded to strict standards and makes minimal use of images for design and layout. I also created multiple plugins for the site as I could not find any to suit my needs at the time.

Technologies Used
Wordpress, XHTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL

» Visit Bangkok Diaries «

Rabeang Bar

Darron — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:09:27 +0000

Rabeang Bar has been my main project over the past week. The bars owners gave me carte blanche over all the design and feature aspects of the site. After looking at their logo and all promotional material that they had on hand, I still couldn’t decide on a layout or colour scheme that I was happy with.

After spending a day or two in the bar (for research purposes only), I decided to go with a dark, clean theme and set about coding it right away. After 24 hours of hard coding I finally had a design that I was happy with and the results speak for themselves.

Having no previous site to work from, I decided that I would base the site on opensource technology so that I could get it up and running quickly. Wordpress was the obvious choice as I have been using it exclusively lately to power all new projects.

Technologies Used
Wordpress, XHTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL

» Visit Rabeang Bar «

Season’s Greetings

Darron — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:44:48 +0000

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way… It’s that special time of year, a magical time, when all your worries seem to fade away, as you slowly slip into the holiday cheer. With only a week to go before you unwrap all your prezzies, eat your Christmas lunches and drink eggnog until you are ready to burst. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my clients, past, present and future a very merry Christmas.

One of the greatest joys of this season is the opportunity to say thank you and wish you the very best for the New Year. Here’s looking forward to a very prosperous New Year and the chance to grow in your respective field.

Now stop reading my reading my site and go and spend a few hours with your loved ones. You can always come back later.

Fresh New Layout

Darron — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:53:35 +0000

One can hardly walk down the street at the moment without seeing a Happy New year sign on every shop window. New Years is about fresh new starts and looking to the future. With that in mind I decided it was time for a change and so today is the day I have decided to launch my new site.

After nearly 3 days of hard coding and countless cups of coffee, I finally came up with a layout that I was happy with. I think the oranges and blues work very well together.

The old site served its purpose admirably but it was not very interactive. I’ve decided to rebuild the site to be more of a central point to my business. Users can view news or comment on designs in an extremely easy to navigate fashion.