When a website project goes wrong
The first thing many web designers do when asked for a new website is fire up Dreamweaver and start coding.
Managing even a small project, however, requires some planning beforehand, to overcome some series of unfortunate events that may happen.
Some of these events are your fault: you're late on schedule, don't test your web site thoroughly, lose interest over time on the job.
Some others are the client's fault: they want to change things when it's too late, they don't pay in time or don't pay at all, demand exhausting meetings over details you're not even supposed to know.
Then come the partners fault: if you are a developer, chances are you prefer to team up with a graphic designer, who produce wonderful website designs, but clunky and unusable, with large visual content and maybe almost no text at all. If you are a graphic designer, you strive to push a really good product, but your developer chops it up and it becomes butt ugly, you need to design new parts of the site and redraw some others.
There come the technical problems, like bugs, incompatibilities between browsers, the control panel doesn't work, the client tests the site on a Windows 2000 or older computer full of viruses and spyware, with Internet Explorer 5 on it on a 640k DSL connection shared with two hundred other people downloading from emule (I'm not kidding).
You only want to do the thing you like best, that is coding or drawing beautiful and standard compliant websites.
Each of these reiterations has other disadvantages, I call them task serialization and latency.
Each piece of work depends on others pieces, and without planning, much of the time you or others sit idle trough all the project time because other people need to do something. You thought having more people meant reducing the time by dividing it, but the work that can be done in parallel, that means in the same timeframe by more than one person, is not that much.
The task latency means a one hour task will get done in two weeks, just because of a missed telephone call or holidays or contingencies.
Sometimes the client wants to save money by writing his own copy or doing the graphics itself. 80% of the time, the customer doesn't provide the requested work in promised time, and if he/she does it, it's sub par with the rest of the project, as it is done unprofessionally.
At the end of this mess, you have all your materials and open up Dreamweaver or notepad or your choice of HTML editor, starting as fast as you can to redraw and rewrite parts upon parts of your initial work, because the customer threats to sue you or abandon the project if it is not done in a timely fashion.
The code and graphics you do, at this point, are not accurate and perfect, as the pressure of the work is too much and you simply don't have time to apply the finishes. Testing is reduced to minimum, and many bugfixes are solved by applying patches over code. You even find yourself making decisions outside your area of expertise, like if you are the developer on color, aspect and position of elements, because it would take too much time if asked to the designer to do. You're a designer, but you start writing the text materials to fill in the voids.
Next article I'll provide useful information on how to solve these common problems.
Do you recognize some situations that happened to you? I would be happy to receive comments.