A month ago I decided to so something constructive instead of sitting at home all day long adding no value to my or anyone else's life apart from ofcourse, housekeeping and feeding two people everyday to the best of my ability. Earning money is one thing, being satisfied with what you are doing is quite another. My life did not meet any of the two criteria as opposed to my past where at any given point atleast one criteria was met. So I finally managed to find someone to whom I could offer some help and return get some peace of mind for myself. The requirement was "designing" a website. Now as I began the project, to my surprise, I started to realise, designing meant building a website in this particular case.
Instead of going back to those guys stating that I would be happy to just design the website in terms of layout and over all look and feel and navigation and blah, I decided to just go for it and build the website. But later I realised, by designing, it also meant copy writing for the website. And I went with the flow. I decided to take that up too. This was easily more than what I could handle.
Let's take a quick look at my background before we proceed. I like to write but I am not an expert at copywriting - infact I have very recently learnt how to write professionally and it is a difficult job. I cannot do so without supervision. I have developed liking for designing in the past couple of years, not exactly graphics design but design as a method to build things that they make sense and address the need. And I do know a little bit of graphics design too. Apart from that, I completed by bachelors in computer science so I do know coding but the last time I coded was in 2008 and that was mainframes. I took up an altogether different profession after that, which did not need me to deal with code directly.
So, I got into a totally non-comfort zone. I could do all of it but I wasn't too sure about anything. I started anyway. Lots of design ideas and writing and scrapping it all and starting all over again happened a couple of times and I did take my own sweet time to freeze the design - which was three weeks to be precise! :) I had one more week to go before I should deliver the website and that's when the situation got bad. It had been more than 8 years that I did anything to do with html programming and I was about to build a website in HTML5. I thought how bad can HTML5 be? It should be a cakewalk! And it wasn't too bad but just that I decided to do it in the best possible way and drive it using code as much as I can. That scr**ed me up. jQuery and javascript is not too difficult but it takes time. Had it not been for stackoverflow.com and w3schools, I would not have completed this. I almost learnt 3 scripts in a week's time. And one thing really made life difficult for me, my old habit with incorrect syntax. I have spent 3 days just trying to figure out why would a certain functionality not work and the reason was just improper syntax. That's the kind of error that's very difficult to detect because your code just breaks and YOU DON'T KNOW WHY?
Finally a day after the designated deadline I did finish the work and then I was like, next 15 mins and I should be done. I just had to host the site. No points for guessing. The hosting service was horrible and more worse was the folder structure created by someone who did not believe in logic. I could do it yesterday but I realised I had not been paying attention to my poor husband at all. So decided to give it all a break and spend a nice evening with my husband. Today morning, with a fresh mind I tried attacking the problem and within minutes decided to give it up and call the customer support guys and get that resolved. That was done two hours ago and the site was up. Shot an email to the guys I am working with. Now waiting for their response.
So after long working hours, really shitty meals (because I would make them while still thinking about the code and end up adding or not adding a few ingredients), a messy house, lack of sleep/communication/exercise I did finish this project that I feel has turned out to be quite ok.
Here's the first version of the website and I am waiting to receive some information for the banner after which the banners will be updated. That along with some cosmetic changes should complete my site. But I am too excited to share this..
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