Long Overdue Update
I’m not really sure where this is going to go. I guess I can start with where this left off. The meeting many months ago that the previous post was about. Unfortunately that meeting didn’t turn into a job for me. Might have been worthwhile, but what I wanted to do, and what she wanted, and what she was willing to offer didn’t really match. Maybe it would have been a good learning experience. Learning to work with clients who expect a lot, but aren’t willing to offer much.
From there I continued with school projects. I did the Gender Outlaws Website, which didn’t end up being quite what I was looking for, and certainly can be worked on some more. And also a bit of a draft site for TR By Hand, which also didn’t end up being quite what I wanted. That needs to be developed further, to provide the kind of content management that I’d like to have for that site, as well as the styling that would really suit the material.
Since then, there hasn’t been a whole lot of work done. I created the TR By Hand Blog which is starting to look like it might get updated on a more regular basis shortly. Still trying to get Tricia to be comfortable about the blog, and posting and stuff.
Also I have been working on a website for Ward Street Place which is coming along slowly, but surely. That site will not be updated and may be moved right off of the Armispian Systems site in the near future. The styling is pretty rudimentary, as I more like to work with the code than the styling of the site. I am really not a “designer” more of a “developer”. Unfortunately most people don’t see the value of development, and are not designers themselves, so will probably be looking mostly at the designs of my websites, rather than the development end of my websites.
Stuff that drives me batty, most people never notice. Some of these things are: Sites that claim to have valid HTML/CSS when they are clearly not (sorry no examples at this time); sites that use tables for formating when all of that could be done without the use of formatting that is problematic for screen readers and such (eg. Google, Web Page Layout Using Tables); and sites that do something that produces a website that is not accessible, when doing such would not dramatically change the function, or the design of the site (eg. using flash to present something that can be presented in HTML easier and more easily accessible).
Sometimes I wonder if I should lower my standards. Produce what people are looking for and are willing to pay for. Then I also realize that will probably never happen, that I’ll never lower my standards. I’ll just have to accept that educating people is worth the time that it takes to explain why things are better the way I want to do them, rather than going with something like WordPress for a basic website.
