"Details?....Meet Devil; Devil?... This is Details."
In an earlier post this week I made mention of a website I was re-doing. Now I enjoy this kind of work. I really do. But the part I really hate is when I have all the pages just as I want them and everything looks pretty and happy and I'm satified with my work and now I must tweak.
I hate tweaking.
Tweaking is what I call the final steps in creating a nice, halfway decent site. This is when you go through, page by page, item by item, text box by text box, graphic by graphic and try to compress, squeeze, adjust, modify and otherwise make subtle changes in the code files so that everything loads up just as nice and pretty and fast once online as it does in 'preview' mode. This also when you double, triple and quadruple check any links on each page to make sure they go where they are suppose to and work correctly. It can be mindnumbing work, repetitive and slow-but it's essential, unless you're shooting for something that looks like this!
( which, btw, is a site spoofing BAD websites. It's near perfect in it's badness-except he's got it to load like gangbusters, which if it truly was as bad as it is, it would take about 15 minutes to load with dial-up-I really would like to know how he achieved this-but the guy's a geeky computer egghead, so he's privy to mojo I don't have.)
Anyway, so I'm in the midst of tweaking this site which is mostly out of consideration of the persons who may eventually view this site. You need to cut the fat, make it load up in a decent amount of time-something, being on dial-up- I'm all too well conscious of. I strive to get these files as skinny as possible without losing anything in the translation. This gives the illusion that maybe you actually know what you're doing and does not annoy. As I said, this phase of the process is tedious and boring...and I get easily sidetracked and this lack of control always leads to problems. I have no one to blame but myself.
This time after pouring over and fixing about 6 pages of a 13 page site I got an idea. This is a retail site I'm working on and the 'buy' buttons, although cute and functional, were blah. I knew of a little trick I could do to make them appear that they light up when clicked. Hmmm, I could try that. It would just mean generating another little graphic and since I had cut gobs of fat already, I could spare that. It might be neat.
DOH!
OK, so I did my little trick. Yes, the buttons looked neat-o and lit up as they were suppose to...except now the link to the cart wouldn't work! Arrrrgh! Ok, back to square one. Dangit!
I bagged my idea, deleted that graphic and the command and now we're back to blah buttons and cart links that work. True, I could take the time to try and figure out a way to make the links work AND still have the buttons light up but I really didn't have the patience for that and I could see where it would lead to-even more unnecessary weirdness. So, blah buttons will do for now. Time to get back to work at hand. But now I can't remember just where in my tweaking I left off! Was I in the middle of page 6 or page 5? Or maybe I got as far as page 7? I couldn't recall. I hate when that happens.
So now I have to review and double check...more tediousness. (just like this post!)
I do this all the time and I hate myself for it. It just burns up more time and makes the process more painful than it needs to be. I should finally figure out to leave well enough alone...but I don't. I always tell myself to make sure I have a notepad at my elbow so I can make these sort of notations to myself as to where I left off...but even if I have a notepad, I don't write it down!
The mind is a terrible thing!
I had big hopes that this site would be live by Tuesday, but at this rate-don't hold your breath!
I hate tweaking.
Tweaking is what I call the final steps in creating a nice, halfway decent site. This is when you go through, page by page, item by item, text box by text box, graphic by graphic and try to compress, squeeze, adjust, modify and otherwise make subtle changes in the code files so that everything loads up just as nice and pretty and fast once online as it does in 'preview' mode. This also when you double, triple and quadruple check any links on each page to make sure they go where they are suppose to and work correctly. It can be mindnumbing work, repetitive and slow-but it's essential, unless you're shooting for something that looks like this!
( which, btw, is a site spoofing BAD websites. It's near perfect in it's badness-except he's got it to load like gangbusters, which if it truly was as bad as it is, it would take about 15 minutes to load with dial-up-I really would like to know how he achieved this-but the guy's a geeky computer egghead, so he's privy to mojo I don't have.)
Anyway, so I'm in the midst of tweaking this site which is mostly out of consideration of the persons who may eventually view this site. You need to cut the fat, make it load up in a decent amount of time-something, being on dial-up- I'm all too well conscious of. I strive to get these files as skinny as possible without losing anything in the translation. This gives the illusion that maybe you actually know what you're doing and does not annoy. As I said, this phase of the process is tedious and boring...and I get easily sidetracked and this lack of control always leads to problems. I have no one to blame but myself.
This time after pouring over and fixing about 6 pages of a 13 page site I got an idea. This is a retail site I'm working on and the 'buy' buttons, although cute and functional, were blah. I knew of a little trick I could do to make them appear that they light up when clicked. Hmmm, I could try that. It would just mean generating another little graphic and since I had cut gobs of fat already, I could spare that. It might be neat.
DOH!
OK, so I did my little trick. Yes, the buttons looked neat-o and lit up as they were suppose to...except now the link to the cart wouldn't work! Arrrrgh! Ok, back to square one. Dangit!
I bagged my idea, deleted that graphic and the command and now we're back to blah buttons and cart links that work. True, I could take the time to try and figure out a way to make the links work AND still have the buttons light up but I really didn't have the patience for that and I could see where it would lead to-even more unnecessary weirdness. So, blah buttons will do for now. Time to get back to work at hand. But now I can't remember just where in my tweaking I left off! Was I in the middle of page 6 or page 5? Or maybe I got as far as page 7? I couldn't recall. I hate when that happens.
So now I have to review and double check...more tediousness. (just like this post!)
I do this all the time and I hate myself for it. It just burns up more time and makes the process more painful than it needs to be. I should finally figure out to leave well enough alone...but I don't. I always tell myself to make sure I have a notepad at my elbow so I can make these sort of notations to myself as to where I left off...but even if I have a notepad, I don't write it down!
The mind is a terrible thing!
I had big hopes that this site would be live by Tuesday, but at this rate-don't hold your breath!
posted by white trash republican at Saturday, January 14, 2006
1 Comments:
OMG, Liz, can you introduce me to Turd the Guitar God? You know Dan works a lot in the summer and well, a girl can get mighty lonely. That's one kewl site he's got!
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