…not yet close enough to Friday. :(
Work on the new site is getting both scary and frustrating. My stylesheets and .jsp templates were taken by the template developers, who are based in London. I keep getting weird emails asking about changing things that we had already previously agreed on. Yesterday one of them mentioned handling a layout issue with an inline style. I wrote back to say that the template that I had designed worked perfectly fine – wasn’t he referring to that, rather than just the screenshot of the page? He wasn’t. I also reminded him that I had said several times that I don’t want inline styles coded into the individual pages. He wrote a very snarky letter back and said that, in the interests of time, they had made some decisions to handle things a certain way. I flipped and wrote a polite, but very stern mail back asking them to stop and document all of their “changes” and unilateral decisions, and cc’d my boss. *sigh*
This very expensive ecommerce system that the company invested in is designed for companies that can’t develop anything on their own. A lot of companies hired an outside design agency to develop the look and feel, and then these mockups are turned over to the template developers to code. The code is evidently (since I have’t actually seen any of it in action yet) proprietary code, not just plain JSP, and will supposedly require very expensive training to learn to change any of the templates. Nice racket, guys. I found this out when I asked them for some expert help in installing Tomcat on my system, and they said that what I learned on my own wouldn’t really apply to this system. True, or not? I have no way of knowing at this point.
We’ll see what happens. To add to the amount of sand in my suit, the woman who was the “web designer” on the present FrontPage static site is getting extremely pissy, and I’m not sure at what point I should confront her about it. Hey, I’m sorry that everything was taken away from you; I’ve done my best to find a way to keep you as part of the team. Everything that I know I’ve taught myself or learned on the job; it is each our own responsibility to learn and keep our skills current. If you stay at a late-nineties level, then you have only yourself to blame.
Grrr…I refuse to be in a bad mood this morning. Even though it looks very grey, again. Even though I’m no where near the weekend.
I can *so* relate. You sound like me when I was living in Cleveland, coding Java and JSP pages and fighting against stupid things.
I was also self-taught and learned on the job (and have now forgotten much of it, sadly).
Somehow, though, I don’t miss it at all.
Skills left in the 90s? That’s me, I’m afraid.
What it does give me though is a finely tuned bullshit detector for when we have to talk to web developers.
*gack* not that I’m implying you’re one of those …
*blush*
I think I’ve dug myself deep enough now. If you’d be kind enough to just fill in the hole over me … :-)
There are some days when I think I wouldn’t miss it at all, either. :(
Hahaha…that was very funny; I read thaty yesterday and was laughing out loud like an idiot at my desk. :)
Trouble is, these days my bullshit detector seems to be on the blink. I don’t know what’s a legitimate excuse, and what’s not. They work for a consulting firm, they’re in London, and we’re communicating by email. I haven’t seen any of their code yet.