Pat Whatley
New Member
Every year I help put on a music festival in my town. Part of my job is to handle the web design. I don't know how to do web design, I don't like it, it bores the ever loving mess out of me as bad as doing tax paperwork. This year I thought I'd found the perfect solution. I ran across a post on an internet site where a college student majoring in web design was offering to design a website for free as a class project. I jumped right at it after looking at his personal site and a couple of examples he had posted. He selected our event and I thought we were golden.
The idea was for me to sketch out a "map" of the site and to send him all the elements. He would place them, scale them, code them to do what they needed to do. Got him everything he needed and he went to work.
He sent over his first mockup and it just didn't have the feel or look we were trying to get. From the looks of it he was using a pre-made futuristic template, we're a blues/zydeco festival. I sent him some ideas, told him more about what we needed, sent him links to several different sites that fit better.
He worked on it more. His next proof had taken three pages and combined them onto the home page. Not a bad idea, I guess, but the way they were set up made it hard to follow. Then he took the sponsor logos that I was VERY specific about order and placement on, and explained why, and he made them all the same size and in alphabetical order, completely ignoring what I'd told him.
His last attempt he tried to make it more "bluesy" by changing the background color from white to black. He place all the band pics I'd sent him but instead of the order I'd asked for he put them in reverse order.
It's not bad work but it's not good either. I can't do we design and the sites I mashed together the last few years were better. Last night I figured I'd already set the elements up for him so I'd see what I could hack out in Muse. In two hours I got 90% of the way finished with the site (very simple site with static pages)
We're in a bit of a time crunch now and I don't think he's going to be able to get us what we need in the next few days and we're going to be better off using mine.
So now I have to tell the kid, who has done all this work and who probably tried his best and who was really looking forward to having his version of the site online, that we're not going to use him. That is bothering me more than I thought it would. If we were paying for this I'd be pounding on him to get him to do what we were paying him for. I'd make him listen (since apparently that's not what he's good at) and stay on him to get things to me faster. Since we're not paying for it all we have to do is pull the plug and go a different direction. The ease in making that decision has really been eye opening.
Just something to think about.
The idea was for me to sketch out a "map" of the site and to send him all the elements. He would place them, scale them, code them to do what they needed to do. Got him everything he needed and he went to work.
He sent over his first mockup and it just didn't have the feel or look we were trying to get. From the looks of it he was using a pre-made futuristic template, we're a blues/zydeco festival. I sent him some ideas, told him more about what we needed, sent him links to several different sites that fit better.
He worked on it more. His next proof had taken three pages and combined them onto the home page. Not a bad idea, I guess, but the way they were set up made it hard to follow. Then he took the sponsor logos that I was VERY specific about order and placement on, and explained why, and he made them all the same size and in alphabetical order, completely ignoring what I'd told him.
His last attempt he tried to make it more "bluesy" by changing the background color from white to black. He place all the band pics I'd sent him but instead of the order I'd asked for he put them in reverse order.
It's not bad work but it's not good either. I can't do we design and the sites I mashed together the last few years were better. Last night I figured I'd already set the elements up for him so I'd see what I could hack out in Muse. In two hours I got 90% of the way finished with the site (very simple site with static pages)
We're in a bit of a time crunch now and I don't think he's going to be able to get us what we need in the next few days and we're going to be better off using mine.
So now I have to tell the kid, who has done all this work and who probably tried his best and who was really looking forward to having his version of the site online, that we're not going to use him. That is bothering me more than I thought it would. If we were paying for this I'd be pounding on him to get him to do what we were paying him for. I'd make him listen (since apparently that's not what he's good at) and stay on him to get things to me faster. Since we're not paying for it all we have to do is pull the plug and go a different direction. The ease in making that decision has really been eye opening.
Just something to think about.
