Monday, September 25, 2006

Not Exactly a Tom Petty Song

Tom Petty sings "The Waiting is the hardest part"; for me "The Finishing The Project" is the hardest part. It often is significanltly more difficult than it should be. Typically, the "figuring out" of things that I enjoy and spend my time on during projects. After that part is done, it is a lot harder for me to stay focused on the result. This is especially true if the project I'm working is spread out over time and interrupted frequently by other projects.

Fortunately, I have finally finished a website project that was started at least six months ago. It's not live (as of this moment), but will be within a week or so. There were many breaks in the project along the way and many unanticipated hurdles overcome or avoided. I have to provide thanks to Splork for his nagging and encouragement and for initially going out and getting the artwork. It is very much like him to take a few comments out of context like "Man I wish we had some good artwork for our website. I can make the rest of it fit if we only had that." and go out and get some really exceptional artwork.

It took me a good three weeks (not continuously studying this, but with interruptions of course) just to figure out how I could do it. This "figuring out" was a lot of fun and also necessary, since I ran my mouth off that I could do it. Three weeks isn't so bad for a project, but the next 5 months are not something I want to repeat for a long time. I'd prefer to keep the "figuring out/grunt work" ratio quite a bit higher than it was with this one.

There are still a few little things that people will look at when they see the website and say "this needs to be done" or "why didn't they do this?". To that, my answer will be "Wait for it, Tom Petty-style."

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