Bundoran Press, an independent publishing house the specializes in speculative fiction (Fantasy and Science Fiction), recently decided to redo their webpage. I volunteered. Because it would only take me three hours — max. My friend, Brian Garside, once told me that whenever he told his wife he was going to the Home Depot, that whatever time he thought he was going to be, he knew he had to double it and then add 20. So an hour: 2 hours 20 minutes. Surprisingly, this was a very effective measuring tool.
Unfortunately, I need something like triple it, add five, multiply by 2, and then subtract negative five. Because see how nice and clean that site is? You see it? Look again. It’s very clean and simple. That took miles and miles of code. And I didn’t even design it. I paid $12 for the layout from Themeforest. Then I bought a simple shopping cart called PHP Shopping cart from Code Canyon for $9. Wow, what a deal! Except merging the two together was horrific. Because I was doing something that didn’t want to be done.
I’m like Seth Brundle from the fly (pre-transporter). I am not an expert at any one thing. I cobble. I take some CSS, I take some PHP, I use MySQL…but in this case, the code was written by a real computer programmer and so I was fighting waaaaay above my weight class. Then the design…errr…you’ve tuned out.
Either way, swing by and took a look. It’s a super nice site…I think.