July
I have been missing for a full month.
Back in July I agreed to make a website for someone that owns a restaurant in the north west. As someone that loves to make my own websites – usually with the intention of never showing them to anyone other than my wife – I don’t often get pushed into making anything particularly challenging. They are always pretty simple sites that play on the skills I’ve accumulated over the years. I’m not a web developer – I just know how to do a couple of things.
Once we found the theme we were going to work from as the foundation, I made it clear to the person I was making the site for that, with this theme, it’s all about the imagery. I can make what they want, but if they want it to give the flashy impression that they want to show off, they need to invest in bad boy photography.
September
It took a good month before we agreed on the particulars of the site, what needed shooting, and what additional text we needed to improve on their current website. I expected a delay, but it took a lot longer than I thought it would to get things going properly. It took until mid-September to book the shoot (set for the beginning of October). At that point, I should have begun.
In September, I was trying to hype myself up to make the first step in the process. I needed to get ready to make this site. I was going to prepare things so that all I needed to do was insert the images. It didn’t happen. I was in a daze with my new lifestyle, now that I have a schoolboy, my work hours have been adjusted to suit.
I can’t even tell you what work I was doing in September, because whatever it was, I can’t see the results of it anywhere.
October
October lands. The shoot went smoothly. The photographer got the photos back to us within 48 hours and that’s when it hit me: it’s all on me now. By this point, a project that only 3-4 people initially knew about was now being discussed by the restaurant’s whole management team, who were all waiting for me to do my thing, after hyping up how beautiful I could make their establishment look.
Why hadn’t I started earlier?
It’s over to me, and I don’t even know if I was really capable of it. Once I had cleared all other work out of the way, I decided that I wasn’t going to do any other work whatsoever until this website was done.
Week 1
On 8th October I bought the theme and then made a rough plan.
(Yes, I should have done both of these so much earlier, but I’m here to tell my truth).
When I say that I’m inexperienced at this kind of stuff, let me make it very clear that I have no idea how you transfer the contents of one site to another, so my plan with this is to make it on one domain and then basically copy the HTML of each page to this new site after. I’m sure it’s wrong, but I didn’t have time to consider any alternative way of doing things.
Before I had even started, I was over £450 down. I’d paid for the photographer myself, so he would send over the images ASAP and I hadn’t realised the theme also required me to buy a separate plugin for the headers. Considering I told the client that this was going to be an easy £250 job, it was a bad start.
It was too late to think about all of that extra stuff though – I need to get this website live.
I’ve made so many websites before and I had been fixing small elements of the restaurant’s earlier site for some time prior, but I haven’t done anything like this before, so I really needed to focus for this one (for a change).
I decided to make a spreadsheet that stated:
- Each page
- Priority level
- Imagery status
- Text status
- Completion percentage
It’s go time.
Once I had downloaded all the plugins I needed, I realised I should probably write down each step of the process, so I could go back and just follow the steps to do it all over again for the real site.
Once I had done all of the easy stuff of changing the fonts, colours and foundation customisations, the real hard work began.
It quickly became apparent that it didn’t look like I was making progress unless I deal with the imagery first. When you have stunning visuals, it makes you forget about the small details surrounding it. So I did. And had a terrible time in the process.
I have very limited knowledge about raster vs vector files, image resolutions and things along those lines, so when I uploaded my first image and it was completely blurry, I was ready to give up. Thankfully, I figured that by compressing and editing the file type I could keep them looking as stunning as the photographer intended.
As I went through my to-do list, I kept coming across new challenges and putting them to one side as I aimed to tick off as many things as I could. Despite making a priority list that compared the most important pages to the ones that aren’t likely to be looked at, I ended up making all of the easy pages first because there were soooo many things I struggled with.
Week 2
A week into the project and I thought I would have got a lot more done than I actually had. To be fair, I had been continuing with my daily post-lunch gym sessions, so krept realling eating into my workdays by doing this.
It’s only just hit me now (as I write this) that I told one of the managers that I would be done within two weeks. At this point, it was obvious that I wouldn’t get anywhere close to the finish line by the end of that week.
My work schedule (based around when the boys were out of the house/asleep) roughly gave me a maximum of 9.30am-2.45pm and then 7pm-9.30pm, which might mean five hours of actual work on the site per day.
In Week 2 I was stressed that the #1 priority page – the homepage – was a complete state. I couldn’t:
- Remove some of the stylised elements from the template
- Figure out how to place and resize some of the imagery
- Find where you change the colour of the link text
- Fix the footer
- Figure how to make it display properly on mobile
- And there are probably plenty more things I’ve forgotten about
Towards the end of the week, the client I was making the site for finally hit me up and asked me when I expect that it will be complete. It was bad of me to not keep him in the loop, but I was literally spending every moment I could working on the project, so it hadn’t even crossed my mind that I needed to keep on top of the communication as well.
At that point I realised that I hadn’t really been working towards any particular date – I was just going until I was done. A date would actually help give this project more focus. I decided that as the restaurant would be closed on 1st November, it would make perfect sense to put up a maintenance page on 31st October while I worked on it that night, and get the new site live the following day. So I told him: by the end of next week (24th October) I’d be able to show him a 90% completely version of the site in time for it to be done by 1st November.
Pressure.
Week 3
In week 3 I got invited to come to the restaurant. I had no choice but to go down and knew that it meant I would have to speed things up and get the site to a much better condition quickly, because they were bound to ask to see it.
Despite the hurry, I really struggle to work past 9.30pm each night, so while I was trying my best to get as much done as I could, late nights were out of the question. I had to just crack on and focus on making the things presentable. By the time I went up to Chester, the site had to look like it was nearly ready to go.
I was stressed on that two and a half hour drive. STRESSED! I knew that I’d done my best, but there was still plenty to do. Plus, he hadn’t seen ANYTHING yet, so might not even like what I’d created up to this point, regardless of the small details that I’d have to deal with after.
Thankfully, my idea of a 90% completed site was SOLID. The website looked good and while I could see all of the things that needed fixing, the client was very happy with the progress I’d made. It was a HUGE relief and it was what I needed to motivate me to get the final bits completed soonish.
Week 4
With sign off on the homepage and two of the other seven important pages, I just needed to get busy with all of the rest. While I’ve usually got a tendency to become complacent at this stage of any project, I was fully focused on being able to get everything ready for this self-imposed 1st November date.
Nothing else mattered. I didn’t gym. I skipped a couple of school runs. I didn’t stop work in the evenings to watch Married at First Sight. I didn’t have time for anything else.
I kept going and literally wasn’t happy with the site until the night before the big switch was scheduled.
Switchover Day
I woke up on 31st October – Halloween and copied the HTML for each of the pages, checked my documentation, and felt that I was ready for the final transition by 8am. I then told the team for brace for website downtime from 10pm that night, and continued about my day.
On Halloween we had:
- Bike lessons for the boys in Leicestershire
- Birthday party in our village
- Trick or treating in our village
- Bonus trick or treating family in other parts of Nottingham
It was a busy day. And by the time the boys were in bed (at 8.30pm – much later than usual) I had to remind myself that my work hadn’t even begun. In spite of my warning to the team, I had to start on the transition as soon as I opened my laptop. No delays.
Let’s go.
I bought the theme (again) along with the header plugin and went through the steps, as I’d written down. I did the fundamental customisations easily, so things were well on their way.
I was in deep concentration and, after such a long day, Hollie decided to go to bed extra early – just after 9pm. Usually there’s a faff when she goes to bed early, because it accelerates my tiredness, but on this occasion it was just what I needed. It meant that I could slap on 1Xtra and just focus on the task at hand. She gave me a midnight deadline to come to bed, but I told her I can only get there when I’m done. A deadline won’t make a difference this time around.
The next step was the footer and – hang on – it’s not working. I don’t know why, but it’s nothing like the one I had on the other site, and I couldn’t work out why.
STRESS!
Rather than slowing myself down, I decided to continue on with other bits that I assumed would be easier to do and continued on. First – the homepage.
I had tried once on the tester domain, so assumed it would be the same for this one. All I needed to do was to copy the HTML of the page and paste it onto this new page and it would recreate it. So here I go. Copy. Yep. Paste. Yep. Preview…
No.
Not even close.
I felt the energy drain out of my body in that moment.
I realised what a mess I got myself in. I hadn’t backed up the old website and I literally didn’t have a clue if I would be able to get the job done.
FFS!
On top of everything, it was already 10.30pm.
FFS!
In that moment I thought about:
- Remaking the old site
- Going to sleep to reset my head
- Trying to remake the new site in a completely new way
None of those options felt right, so I tried a couple of different things until I cracked the code and managed to paste the code in a way that made it 90% the way I needed it to be, and it wasn’t took much effort to make up the rest of that 10%.
I followed the same flow for the rest of the pages. After the homepage, I reverted back to the non-urgent ones, to make sure I ticked off plenty of the easy stuff. Then I had to deal with some image issues. And then I had to crack on with some of the more complicated tasks (that required much more than copy-paste business).
It was starting to take shape.
Page after page, I was working through it and I could see that it was coming to life. I was doing it and it was just a matter of time before the site would be complete. By the time I knew that I was in full flow, I was deep into Snoochie Shy’s show. By 1pm, I decided that I would only carry on for another half hour before I stopped.
I texted Hollie just before I went upstairs to bed, alerting her that I wouldn’t be able to wake up when the boys do in the morning. I let her know that I would need her help in the morning to distract the boys (who had an inset day, so wouldn’t be going into school/preschool) while I did the finishing touches to the site.
Overtime – 1st November
6.15am, the boys ended the room and Hollie ushered them downstairs to avoid them waking me up. It’s a good job that they actually did, because it meant that as soon as they were downstairs, I could get my MacBook out and crack on with the rest.
The final time-intensive part of the process was to create individual menu items. It took so damn long and I knew that I needed full concentration because it’s so easy to make errors with it.
Three hours later and the boys came up to wake me up, not knowing I’d been working hard since they got up. Hollie had no idea, but continued with her plan to take the boys out for a little while, giving me the time to do what I needed to do.
I finished off the menu items, fixed up a few things that I’d not quite got right the first time around and the project was done in just over 8 hours.
I was relieved.
Although it was a minor pressure compared to the other stuff, I also had to go back to Chester that evening, so I really needed to make sure it was done ASAP that day. I was lucky to be able to squeeze in a nap before that 7pm appointment. The day ended at 11.45pm when Hollie and I had got back from a banging meal at Opera.
Following on from all of this, I’m retiring from making websites for other people.