05.22.99
Early to Rise/Site Dev Process
May 22 Sat (12 AM)
This morning I was at work at 7:30am. Wow. The last time I did that was… Tuesday. Well that was for that seminar, but today I actually got in in order to get some work done.
Boy did I have work. I’ve been swamped this week, particularly for trying to get things out of the way for next week.
This week’s problem was a situation where I felt inundated with this particular client’s media. We’ve got just a small sub-section of an overall corporate site to rebuild, but between pulling data out of a couple of PageMaker documents, a PDF, a few dozen random pieces of imagery in all sorts of formats, and a nearly impenetrable ‘outline’ of a ‘page’, I was feeling awfully overwhelmed.
As I’m apt to do, instead of admiting that I was feeling in over my head, or at least tackling the thing ahead of time, I ended up waiting for the last possible day (though I was procrastinating with real work (the aforementioned Perl tools)) before establishing a beachhead on this war.
Step one was to classify all the media: 8 different image subjects, text and layout files, spreadsheets, and ‘project management’ documents (including e-mailed instructions and file descriptions, and an outline of the content).
These were then all uploaded to a proper work folder on the Network so that they backed up properly.
Once the media was sorted (or Wrangled to use an old Creative Multimedia term) then I could get down to figuring out how the site will be structured.
I took the incredibly rough outline, and knocked it around. The various line items were grouped, and sorted in order of precedence, This gave me a nice tight outline with just 4 major sections: Catalog, Details, Accessories, and Documentation.
Now I can work up a menu. Once I have this menu in place I can start setting up subdirectories for each section.
That’s where I stopped tonight (because at this point I could figure out what needed to be translated to Spanish and handed that off to the Translators), but at this point I can start going into each section, using the main page as the template for the new page, and start pulling out the inforamtion that I need from the media that I sorted earlier. This process revolves around pulling pieces of text out of the PageMaker and PDF files, and slapping them onto the pages.
As I move forward coding each page, I can drop in the graphics from the rest of the media: images, charts, etc. Usually I’ll develop an image treatment on the fly: various border styles, a consistant bounding box (or at least proportional), and color balancing. I’ll pick one final treatment that I like, then record as much of it as I can to a Photoshop Action. This way I can reapply these effects on demand.
That last paragraph is repeated time and time again, page by page, section by section, until I’m done.
This verison leaves out the brainstorming/design process that happens with sites that I have more control over. I’ve tried my best to document this process, but it’s very organic, and very dependent on the project.
Of course, I’ve worked on a wider variety of sites that most people have (I think), so I may end up making my format too broad, too inclusive. I really ought to narrow it down into a standard for commercial sites.
Oops, it’s Saturday… I think I’m a pumpkin.