WHY ME?

By Mark on Friday 30 January 2004 at 12:13

For the past two(ish) weeks I've been developing the new company web site. Designing for you own company is really hard, because everyone in the company wants to have their say, and you want it to be perfect, which of course is impossible. However, Ed came up with a good design which we all liked immediately, and so I set to work building the site.

I knew it would be quite tricky, as we're building to XHTML Strict spec and making the site accessible (which won't mean a thing to most of you, but hey). As it turned out, 'quite tricky' now holds the Guinness World Record for the largest understatement ever made by a web developer.

Why? Why should it have to be this hard? In the past couple of weeks, everything that could have gone wrong, has. I won't bore you with the techy bits; suffice to say that every single step of the build has taken at least four or five times as long as it should have due to bugs in web browsers, technology failures, having to work around silly little annoyances etc etc.

If it sounds like I'm being silly about this, imagine what it feels like to spend three hours solely trying to make a one-pixel wide border appear down one side of an orange box.

And now, the final straw. Yesterday I tried to take some digital photos for use on the site. Sounds simple, huh? Nooooooo...

I took the photos yesterday with the camera we have at WebSelect, a Nikon. Unfortunately, it wouldn't focus on anything, and after an hour of struggling through the worst user manual ever written, I gave up and decided to bring in my own camera from home. 1 wasted day.

Today, I brought my camera in, and took another load of shots. All went well; I got some good stuff, so we plugged the memory card into my boss's PC to get the pictures into Photoshop... and it crashed his machine.

Plugged the card reader into my PC: same thing happened. It turns out that for some bizarre reason, the memory card from my camera will not work in the WebSelect card reader (although it did this morning, when I FUCKING TESTED IT TO MAKE SURE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAPPENED). Another wasted day.

So now, I have to go home, burn all the images to CD on my PC (which is almost identical to my work machine but inexplicably works fine with the memory card), then bring in the CD and work on the images from that. And if I need another image, I have to take it on the camera which doesn't focus (OR, take it on my camera, drive the 30 miles back to Plymouth, email it to myself at work and drive back).

Still following? Neither am I, and that's why I've given up. Obviously there is a higher power at work here, and he/she is a complete c**t.

It's Ed's official inauguration party tonight (it was supposed to be the company site launch too, but I've almost given up hope of that ever happening), so I'm going to get extremely drunk and forget about all this. Hopefully my ranting has given some of you a chuckle…

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