Blog · Websites
I only wanted one website
It began with a perfectly reasonable plan: one website. One. A quiet corner of the internet for family photos and a few stories, built in an afternoon, tea on the side. That was a few websites and an unknown number of afternoons ago.
Because yes, I now have four. Below is how that happened: for each site who it is for, why it exists, and a button to open it right here. Prefer the real site in a tab of its own? Cmd- or Ctrl-click, or choose a new tab at the top of the window.
1. uijttewaal.info: where it went wrong
Who it is for: family, the curious, and anyone wondering what a canning factory looked like.
Why: there was a family archive with photos of L.P. Uijttewaal N.V. and of people nobody can quite place any more. Keeping it digitally seemed a better idea than a shoebox. A shoebox is of course indestructible, I will give you that.
The layout is, let’s be honest, busy. Very busy. It has a blog, a downloads page with free software for the Mac, and an interactive photo album with built-in management, because an ordinary photo album was too tidy for my taste. Richly equipped, I call that. My visitors probably call it “a quick browse and back an hour later”. (The site itself is in Dutch.)
Have a look around uijttewaal.info
2. pimuijttewaal.nl: now with my own name on it
Who it is for: anyone who wants to know who this Pim is.
Why: a website under your own name simply comes with the territory. Whether you have the time for it is a second question, which I carefully did not ask.
At first it was mostly personal: who am I, what have I done and what am I good at. The kind of pages where you suddenly have to take yourself very seriously, which I gave up on after two paragraphs.
Later it became a look behind the scenes: blogs about what I build, how that goes, and above all how it sometimes does not quite go as planned. This blog is a fine example. Or a warning, depending on how you look at it.
Go to the pimuijttewaal.nl homepage
3. thejumpingfox.nl: the business
Who it is for: anyone who wants something built, from an app for iPhone, iPad or Mac to a lightning-fast website.
Why: I recently bought thejumpingfox.nl, the name of my own business, and there had to be one place where everything comes together a little.
Think of it as my digital business card, but one you cannot lose in a coat pocket or among the loose papers on your desk. Yes, I know: it started with one website for family photos and ends at a business card. That is what ambition does.
Take a look at thejumpingfox.nl
4. declaruur.nl: the newest, and not finished
Who it is for: freelancers who want to track their hours, costs and kilometres per client and turn them into a neat timesheet, without spreadsheet misery.
Why: an app wants a website too. Which also explains why I never really stop.
Declaruur is very recent and I am still hard at work on it. It is the only one of the four that I can say with a straight face is not finished. The other three say so too, but they are lying.
Four sites, one server, zero free Sunday afternoons
They all run on the same server and share one management dashboard, which lets me, for example, put all of them into maintenance at once (that was the previous blog). It is a bit like four children: all different, all needing attention, and they know exactly when you are on holiday.
Is this still reasonable? No. But each site answers a different question for a different audience, and for me that is enough to say it was meant this way. The plan was to keep it simple. That failed, but in a very neat way.
Feel free to look around. And if you need something I could build: you know where to find me. On one of the four sites.
Stay safe,
Pim