The beginnings
Some month ago a colleague of mine considered it a good plan to start an own company in a market that is very competitive and has a lot of shady characters.
The project was planned as low-budget as possible: Hand coded HTML, no database functionality, no CMS and just a few pages to do. Nothing fancy.
He hired a designer to come up with a corporate identity and he did a logo and went through some Corbis CDs to find pictures of shiny happy successful people and mood-selling baby pictures.
It was my task then to deliver the web site. Of course the money for the designer ran out when it came to developing a style guide for type and screen design, which is why I made up the CSS on the spot while converting the five word documents the original site was planned for.
The site was a flexible, easy to resize and accessible xhtml + CSS solution and my pride and joy, as I wanted to make it an example of how we can deliver and create nice sites quickly. I even promoted it on here and in some forums to help it get the first hits and maybe a fresh perspective from other people (being the developer you are always too close to the project).
Now, some minor changes later the colleague wanted to get a more prominent contact facility, which was easily implemented. Then the millions of clients didn’t come. (more…)