Nina's Blog - Have to go with the flow sometime

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Unexpected turn of events today with a client coming to see me at 2pm and leaving at 11pm - covered alot of areas of his new site and learnt more about his business. He's an existing long standing client and made me very aware of the fact people expectations of what they can do online has changed dramatically and I learnt also that when a client can see the same image on 4 different screens, and see how they can look so different, the energy used in trying to make something perfect on a website changes alot.

I'm converting the vdc site to DotNetNuke - its been ongoing for ages and have lacked information to finish the site and met with the director today (he's a cat lover and we got on famously talking about our cats!!) I spent the whole afternoon and evening with him, not just becuase he's my client, but because I really wanted to learn more about what people expect from a site.

And I will be doing an article on the *design brief* when working with DotNetNuke and some pointers for those who think they can jump into DotNetNuke, rub their hands together thinking about all the the money they are going to make turning out site after site after site.... I'm still waiting for that to happen, and it's not going to, because regardless of the technology, unless you can understand what your client expects... and get them to understand what you're going to deliver, you're in for a rude shock. The gap between delivering the end product and what the customer is expecting can be huge.

I've learnt over the last 12 months to stop being a perfectionist.. I've got some really cools skins I won't launch until I can get better behaviour, once you start adding content and modules and are left with two options - cut back the design of the skin to make more flexible/expandable or educate your users better on how to work with them. I'm modestly working on a combination of both.

Subsquently my day to finish some pressing work was cut back but Andrew is working on the car this weekend (it's ok - it's in the back here so we're not really ever that far away) and I will be doing all my DotNetNuke work finished and packaged and nothing else. That means I have to push my articles back a few days and that's just life.

What I have included is a couple of cool screen shots of two things that are going to be really hot!! One is a DotNetNuke website - the one I'm talking about and the other is the release Free Skinning Guide - which is the DotNetNuke skinning guide converted to an exe - it's going to rock - and allows me to integrate a whole mix of options. I've not be writing it - one of my clever developers have been.

And next, a quick screen shot of the outcome of today's meeting - what the client ordered - front page with sound effects and links to products/cars/information as per his expectation.

So, this weekend, nothing but core - docs, skins, work, yada.. and I'm feeling a new build coming on.. it's only getting better!

Cheers for now - Bit more sleep is very helpful!!

Nina Meiers

DotNetNuke

posted on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 9:47:00 PM (AUS Eastern Daylight Time, UTC+11:00)