The web site I’ve been working on for months (at a fairly consistent pace, give or take) is now public. It’s for a local apartment management company, owned by the father of a friend. That friend also works there. She endured many hardships since asking me to make them a site in… October? Roundabout?
“Can it be ready by the end of November?” she asked.
“Oh, of course,” I said.
… I’ve heard that big projects always take three times the original estimate. That’s about right.
It’s not even that big or complicated, but represents an enormous amount of my time and is without a doubt the most-involved web-related project I’ve ever completed. Plate’s ‘lets took more of a certain kind of work and there’s “more to show” for that, but in terms of web thingamajigs, there’s a lot more structure and hidden stuff involved in GPM’s site. Every other project before this has been essentially a veneer of divs, purely visually-style. This one’s not much deeper, but there’s jQuery, and php, and it was written in haml and sass and then output through nanoc… some of which mired me for weeks, some of which compensated for that lost time through increased efficiency. Mostly I just learned and learned and learned.
I would like very much to document the various drafts and steps, for posterity and my own interest and because Frank Chimero said there’s not enough talk about process on the internet. And I agree. But not now.
That’s quite enough for tonight. Tell me if it seems broken or wrong in any way.
