07.21.98
Finished Puzzles
Really, it’s done this time.
I’m not kidding. Forest Puzzles, the bane of my exisitance is now available for all the world to see at: <http://www.omsi.edu/forestpuzzles/> or if you prefer: <http://www.omsi.edu/forest/> (boy do I know how to think ahead.) 🙂
Man, what a roller coaster ride. I’ve been working on this thing for exactly a year, down to the day. I was hired at OMSI on July 21st, 1997. That was the day I began working on this site. Finally, I can say “It is launched.”
But the sad thing is, I feel no joy.
This albatross around my neck finally rubbed me raw. I kind of detached from the site about two months ago, when the details of the site became so intensly scrutinized by the sponsor. I understand the drive for accuracy, but there comes a point of diminishing returns where the time it takes to correct a punctuation mistake or a spelling error is simply not worth the effort. The correction or tweak does not significantly enhance the user’s experience.
This was the biggest lesson I learned from this site. The second lesson was that if you are working on graphics on a 21″ monitor, you better have a 640×480 monitor that you can view it on. Third: a good outline at the start can make things much easier. Once the outline was established, it was easy to go through the site and just continually flesh out that initial outline down to the individual pages and graphics.
I know I learned a lot from this project. But it also took a lot out of me. If there was ever something that would take the enjoyment out of web design and development, that would have been it.
It was too big of a bite. Much bigger than I should have taken on alone.
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