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Tuesday, October 26, 2004
As you know, I've recently made a new website for the Cedar Manor Hotel & Restaurant. It took me a long time: I estimate around 65 hours. It wasn't easy but I enjoyed making it and learnt a lot. What follows is an account of what I went through to make a small part of it – you may find it very boring so here’s a dancing cactus to look at instead.
There's an intrinsic part of projects like this that I've only recently noticed and is the reason for this blog: no one ever knows what you went through to make the website. In fact, the whole point of working so hard on it is that the finished site seems simple and easy. If you get it right, there should be no clue as to what goes on behind the scenes.
Ever since I started making it, I've been trying to solve 'the riddle of the feedback form'. Up until now I've been sheltered from this by handy little 'feedback form generators' provided by my hosting company. The trouble was that this hosting company wasn't very good, so I moved to a more professional one. The trouble with this more professional one is that they don't tell you how to do anything, you have to figure it all out yourself. So I was now faced with having to do all the form stuff myself.
I designed my logos, took my photos, wrote my copy, made my site, fixed funny layouts and browser quirks and generally figured out how to make the website do the things I wanted it to do. But all the while the contact page was letting me down - I couldn't get the feedback form to work.
A feedback form is essential. If a customer sees your website and wants to get in touch, they can email you, which is fine. But if they're at work, in a hurry, on an unfamiliar computer or aren't sure what to say, they can use the form, easy peasy. And by using the form, it makes the employee’s job easier since the emails come in a standard format.
So I had to make it work. I researched, experimented, struggled and cursed. It was totally beyond me. Apparently there are two sides to a feedback form: the HTML form (easy) and the CGI/PHP/Perl script (eh?). Without this script, the form doesn't work - it needs it to get the information from the form and email it to wherever it needs to go.
I spent 3 weeks on this, reading everything I could find that had anything to do with forms. I had no idea what I was looking for, what it was called, what I should be doing. But slowly it started to make sense and then last night, I cracked it. I found a script from the sitewizard which I adapted and it worked – sort of. So I did some tweaking in a language I don’t understand and it worked a bit better, but wasn’t perfect. This went on and on and then finally it worked exactly how I wanted it to. Brilliant.
I was incredibly chuffed with myself. I’d achieved something that a few weeks before had seemed utterly impossible and I was really, really pleased. I know there are loads of people out there for whom stuff like this is basic, but to me, it was right on the edge of what my brain can handle.
And then the realisation that no one would ever know anything about this started to dawn on me: all that hard work and only I would know about it.
Well, now you do too!
[See the masterpiece - www.cedarmanor.co.uk/contact.html]
.....posted at 9:35 am permalink
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