Blog About Blogging – Part III
(The third in a series of posts on the creating of Waltzing in Perdition.com For the first, click here.)
And now you understand why I just don’t understand why people call me a perfectionist.
In the next post, I’ll tell you what a nightmare it was finding a coder who understood that when I say Pixel-Perfect, what I’m really saying is “The straight jacket isn’t for my safety…it’s for yours.”
You would not starve for vernacular when it comes to the arena of web design—hardly a distinction in the crowd of other professions. Nevertheless, terms like ‘naming architecture,’ and ‘pixel-perfect,’ and ‘cascading style sheet’ are very much part of the daily diet around here.
So when I decided I’d wracked my brain enough and excavated the concept I wanted, it came time to hand it off to someone with far more coding expertise than myself. I knew I was going to utilize the WordPress engine, and since I’d turned my back entirely on the available themes for the custom style I’d been working on, I knew also that I had to find someone with a skill set geared specifically toward translating everything I’d done to something with which WordPress could communicate.
I searched for professionals on Craigslist, on Google, in local papers and by reviewing other blogs searching for credit lines that might put me on the trail of someone I thought I could trust. Talk about overwhelming. And confusing. In dozens of providers I found very little separating anyone from anyone else, turning my very focused search into something like a game of darts.
I ended up contacting a vendor from a popular online service. I posted the job I needed done and in no time (read: less than one day) had several dozen proposals from vendors all over the world. At prices that both encouraged and concerned me. I don’t know about you, but if something is wildly inexpensive, my mind goes to Wildly Poor Quality.
But I found someone whose work I was able to review and determine was a great place to start. While interviewing this person and discussing the precise work I needed, he read into my language and in between the lines and offered, “…oh, you want pixel-perfect.”
“Did you just say ‘pixel-perfect’?”
“Yeah. Pixel-perfect. You know, where exactly what you’ve desi—”
“I know what it means, believe me. Can I marry you?”
He understood that I insisted, unapologetically, that what I designed in Photoshop should translate to a blog absolutely. Down to the location of each and every pixel.
“And, I’ll know.”
“Lol you’ll know what?”
“I’ll know if there is a single pixel out of place, off-center, or bumped out of alignment. I’ll know.”
He laughed but understood me.
The problem with this (I mean this very kindly) complete idiot, was that he didn’t seem to believe me. Long story short, I discovered too late that though he presented himself as the executer of the actual work, what he was really doing was collecting projects and farming out the actual work to coders offshore.
Which is a nice way of saying that someone with a very wanting command of the english language was allowed to dabble in the design I worked on for weeks and offer ways they felt improved it. Which in Toddland means they thought instigating a nuclear war between nations was time well spent. That’s all I’m going to say about this person and my first experience with hiring outside help.
Granted, I was further along than I was when I started…but no where near my original version. Which sounded like this:
Cute Redhead: “So. How’s the blog design coming?”
Mount St. Helens About Five Seconds Before Erupting: “Well. I’d call it about 85% there.”
Cute Redhead: “Hey! That’s great! You can live with that, right? Yay!”
Moody Artist: “Um. No. No, I can’t ‘live’ with that.”
Cute Redhead: “Oh. Well. Then what are you going to do?”
Insufferable Designer: “I’m not sure. I think a SWAT team repelling down the side of his house and AK-47s is a good wa—”
Cute Redhead: “—I meant about your blog, honey.”
Trigger-Happy Perfectionist: “Oh. I’m not sure. I’ll start blogging, I guess. I’m chomping at the bit. But until this looks exactly the way I see it in my head, I’m going to be impossible to live with.”
Cute Redhead: “Wow. That’ll be different.”
Smart Enough To Shut Up (almost): “Shut up.”
In the next, and final post, I’ll tell you what it’s like to (finally)happen upon a master craftsman. And how, so doing, grace and mercy flows throughout the heart and mind to save the lives of lesser ‘professionals’. And their hacks.
