You gotta love it…. it turns up everywhere:
The last 20% of getting a service just right for launch will take 80% of the allocated time.
Yes folks – I’m in the tidy-up / fettle / tweek phase, and they are all nasty wee fiddly bits: something doesn’t work quite right in IE; a button needs to be moved over just so; words used in help pages; etc…
Creating a new service, or indeed even just changing the visuals for an old service, is never a simple task.
Firstly you have to come up with a coherent design: one that compliments the contents of the site; one that works across all pages within the site; one that is visually appealing; and one that all the parties involved are happy with… Not my forte: I get a designer to do that.
Next you need to modify this design so that it can be created as a validating, accessible, cross-platform base.
What I like to do is then mock-up a few pages, maybe half a dozen, as proper xhtml pages – so that people can poke and prod them, be happy that they render across all browers and platforms, that they scale with font sizes, and that they look fine on different monitor/window sizes.
I’ve done all that, I’ve created the 100+ web pages… and now I’m going through the laborious task of verifying each one actually validates, and actually renders correctly under a range of browsers.
… and who said writing web pages was easy? <chuckle />
