Dev-Picayune

I’ve messed around with personal sites for a lot of years. I think my very first site was at UWF in 1993. My first personal site had almost nothing on it except for a picture of some dirt, an obscure audio clip from the show Doug and some links to a few other sites. Sometime around 1999 or 2000, I did a little bit of graphics work for our church but it was never put into real use (probably because I never finished it — nor did anyone really want what I had done).

But at least now I can say that I have indeed created a site for someone else and it’s actually on the web. I helped redo Paul Heinz’s Phuture World site. I suppose there is a cached version of his site out there someone but I haven’t looked for it. I guess it would be nice to see a before and after, but just take my word for it — it’s an improvement.

Several things about the project were good. I had a very finite site to go after. But even with that, I decided to modify my Pumpkinvine blog system to work for news items to be posted. Now Paul can just use Performancing or any other blogging client to add and edit new news items. As always, I separated content from presentation pretty heavily with tons of CSS (and there are no table elements on the site). My favorite color is blue, but since that’s so heavily used and apparently green is the official color of web 2.0 (a term which I find absurd, of course), I decided to try my hand with some green.

Another thing I did was design the logo. The company name was set to Phuture World. There wasn’t much I could about that, but I decided to give it a decent look and now Paul has an easily usable logo that renders well in black and white documents. I also was responsible for the business tag line — “helping businesses reach tomorrow’s goals”. And while I did do some original copy as well as some editing, I would never claim to be a true copy editor.

As a tangent to the project, I was hoping to decide whether I really would want to do site development on the side or not. Honestly, now, I am not sure. I enjoyed the challenge of it, but the added weight of trying to get it done and actually finished was surprisingly tough to deal with. And I have also run into the same problem that I have had with photography work. Even when I am doing something for free (or supposedly for possibility of a token gift card), I still feel the pressure of trying to make the customer happy. Charging money on top of that just would seem to make the situation unbearable. So even now, I am feeling the sting of a slightly unhappy customer. I am just glad I don’t have to really deal with forcing someone to pay their bills. I think it just highlights the importance of a couple of key things: clearly setting expectations, clearly setting scope, and carefully following a plan that matches the expectations. This doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible, but it does mean that you’ve got to make sure scope doesn’t get out of hand on you. Oh well, live and learn… only all of this is stuff that I have already learned and seem doomed to repeat in one way or the other.