Hey! Everybody Look at Me!
Finally! Finally I got around to sitting down and cranking out a much needed fresh coat of paint around here.
Designing a website for yourself with no deadlines or boundries or bosses or clients or even specific office hours can turn out to be a pain in the ass. You want to Keep It Simple. You want to do every cool CSS trick you come across blog surfin' when you should be working. You want to watch TV. You want to sleep.
You turn off the stylesheet of your sadly outdated site, hoping the blank, empty boring black on white unstyled content will motivate you to get your butt in gear. You throw up a lame apology and explain how turning off the stylesheet is only temporary as you work on the new digs. You even include the date so everyone knows you're on it, change is coming and soon.
You remove the date after it's been up there too long announcing a change that doesn't seem to be happening.
Breaking the thumb of your dominant hand playing goalie for your indoor soccer team throws a kink in things too.
Put me in coach, I'm ready to play.
So I finally sat down and drew up the gameplan:
Phase I - Design.
One night to design. Just man up and crank that sucker out! Change it later if it's that bad.
Phase II - Code it up.
Two nights to slice and code a working template. Get the basic site structure and architecture together and broswer test one night, debug and get the alignment/behaviors/what-have-you's sorted out the next. Post your progress and write out a rambling explaination about what you're up to instead of getting the jump on Phase III.
This is where I am right now, by the way.
Phase III - Integration.
Three nights to integrate into a CMS and update/rewrite the content. Style up all the elements not yet styled and/or anticipated. Forms and ordered lists and pullquotes and stuffs.
Phase IV - Go Time.
One night to write up the necessary redirects, mop up and polish. Move everything over from the test server and flip the switch. Handshakes and cocktails all around. Begin production on a new design.
In Closing...
Who knows if I'll pull this off. I should note that this weekend is already booked up with summer funtimes so Phase III doesn't start until at least Monday. I have the launch date in mind but I'm keeping quiet on that so I don't make promises and then not deliver (again).
In the meantime, styling will probably remain off on all other pages, since they all have to be rewritten from the ground up anyway that's just a waste of time. I added some links over there on the right to some good sites, go check those out.
Really, go. I got enough to do around here without you hanging around, all up in my business.
