I was hired by this NYU student to make him a site so he could have a question and answers website.His original idea was a vlog site although he didn’t know that this was a well known and well used option for blogging.Video blogging isn’t that new,after all.
I had been using WordPress as a cms for a little while at the time and wasn’t nearly enough knowledgeable about themes as I wanted to be. Nevertheless I knew enough and had picked apart a free theme and decided to go from there.The theme was life-is-a-byte and funnily enough was a revision of another theme by n.designstudios(I think).
Being hired by a young man in his 20’s was kind of a kick.
I thought all you 20 year old guys were computer programmers from birth.
–And I also assumed this was going to be an easy do- it- in- your- sleep job.It wasn’t in the end – my client was (as well he should be) very picky about his theme.The mistake was my thinking it was going to be a breeze. Humility.
This particular job required a lot of graphic design and the use of photoimaging software.I ended up resketching his banner image avatar by hand and then scanning it into my imaging program and futzing with it until he liked it. I used photographs from his site and sketched him by eye then compared that sketch with the drawing he gave me when we met up.I could’ve just used the drawing he gave me but the site looked slick and the sketch wasn’t slick enough-it didn’t match.
There is a touch of the school marm about me.He wanted to learn how to make style revisions himself but didn’t know css or html.And since I wanted to use the site in my portfolio I was concerned he would break the xhtml of the templates if he got too crazy.I preached a lot about the use of html for lists when you weren’t actually making a list and the overuse of the strong tag.I made a template for his answers posts in the end.He’s been good about using it so at least all his written posts look the same.Oh-in the end he liked the immediacy of written posts over video posts.But I wish he would use more video posts because there are a zillion blog blogs and not as many video blogs and the internet could use the variety.
As it is the theme isn’t valid xhtml because of the plugin for collapsing categories which generates really bad html. I managed to cut the errors down to about 5 or 6 but as we all know if it ain’t valid it ain’t valid.But the clicking open of the cats was really important to him and since I don’t know javascript I’m stuck using that plugin(from dragonflyeye.com)