O' the joys of work!

Oh man it’s been a busy busy week, and I’m really looking forward for some boring days :)

I got straddled with a task to develop a mini site for the client in 7 days. The design was not that bad, but there some complicated look and feel functionality that needed to be scripted. Me and my friend put in some 10 hour days and managed to deliver, so kinda proud of that. The rest of the team was very appreciative of the effort we put in so that makes it ok. The site is here. It doesn’t use flash, and the fading effects are done through the Adobe Spry framework. Ok enough technicalities :D .

I hate working on tight deadlines, especially when it could have been easily avoided. The design for the site was done by a third party design agency and they usually take their sweet time delivering the design. Then again you can’t fully blame them either because there are numerous discussions with the client that happens, since clients are well known for their difficulty in making up their minds he he. So things get dragged on and on and time decreases on what is available for development. They finalize everything a week before the site is meant for launch and expect us to work miracles. That really gets my goat :)

Designers also come up with fancy designs without really knowing development limitation. Most things can be developed, but sometimes you just need more time and sometimes much research is needed too. Then they hand over the design at the last moment and expect us to deliver the good on deadline. That is one reason why the same developers aren’t recommended to do designing, because the developer will design keeping in mind that he/she will have to develop it and will make it an easy one. I can’t speak for others but I’ve certainly done it when I have to do both the designing and development. Take the easy road, so to speak he he. So when third party designers are used, the quality of the design is higher.

In the end, it’s the project managers’ job to get everything properly organized, but sometime, things just do not go the way they are supposed to.

The other irritating part is to make site compatible with the different browsers available, especially with older versions. Sometimes sites that look great with one version might not be the same with older versions. Hopefully users will learn to stick to one browser or version, making our job easier :D

Sadly a wonderful weekend is over and it's back to dreary old work from tomorrow onwards, and the cycle continues.

Adios and hope y'all have a great work week :D