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the art of building

December 18th, 2005 | tech

Let’s face it, there are two ways of building new websites. One way is to keep everything hidden until finished and then finally unveil this wonderful masterpiece that’s so overwhelmingly huge that it scares people away. It happens on the internerd all the time. Web geeks take on these jobs and during the entire building process the only thing viewers see when coming to the site is a “New site coming soon” banner. Sure this creates suspense, but 1. it usually takes a hell of a long time to build so by the time it’s ready people have lost interest and 2. if something goes wrong or doesn’t work as intended people get upset and never come back.

The second way of building a new site is to steadily work until it’s complete, but leave your progress out in the open. This doesn’t happen often with internerd sties, but I like it better. Sure the wow factor is gone, but 1. there’s new stuff for site visitors to see each time, so they keep coming back and 2. the builder can catch errors while working so problems can be fixed before they cause havoc elsewhere. This way of building is also good for lazy and tech-stupid people like me.

I have internerd dreams just like every other person these days, but my desire to sit in front of a computer screen all day and work on site designs and content is nil, and even when I know what I want I usually can’t figure out how to do it. That’s when I get frustrated and put it off for another day. This brings me to the program Dreamweaver, or Dreamkiller as I now call it. I spend hours using my basic photoshop knowledge to create something I want to use on the site only to have the plan halted because Dreamkiller won’t set it up correctly like I had it in photoshop. Yes, I know I simply need to learn how to use the program better, but that’s not the point. Honestly, I really just needed to test my category listings and I needed a ‘rant’. Of course a rant involves complaining about something and this is the best I could do on short notice (I like to think things through…most of the time anyways). Oh, and I also wanted a way of telling you that yes, I’m working on the site. Damn that Dreamkiller program.

2 Comments

  1. PDF
    December 20th, 2005 at 12:29 am

    Revising live sites works for personal endeavors (my site has never seen an official launch) but it’s near impossible for commercial applications. Customers don’t want to hear things like “Yeah, I know half the site is broken and doesn’t act the way you expect/need it to, but attempt to buy stuff anyway!”

  2. majafa
    December 21st, 2005 at 8:26 pm

    Well, sites for companies/stores are different. If the company is depending on selling stuff direct from the site then yes everything should work to keep customers happy. I was more talking about the stuff like how bands like to launch new websites everytime they release a new album or something. I mean, sure it’s neato when the website has the same theme as the new album’s jacket and stuff, but is it really necessary to kill the old, perfectly working site, just to put up a “new site soon” banner to change the theme to match the album release? That kind of stuff bugs me.

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