Mission Accomplished...

I finished my two projects this week. After 5 months of going back and forth with Alfonso, the owner of a local tour busing company, I finally completed his website. Let me add that I am torn by this. He wants me to put my mark on the website but I am torn. I do want to put my mark on the site; it would drum up more business. But I am not at all satisfied with the design and layout. You see from day one I made it clear that Alfonso needed to approve all designs before going forward. I came up with a suitable template and we were on our way. I did it with 3 colors...dk blue, dk grey and white. I knew his buses were more like a Confederate Grey but like I am about to explain: Alfonso was supposed to supply all photos and color scheming. Still it seems that he could not provide anything, let alone in a timely and orderly manner. To keep ahead of myself, I would post updates to a mock website, so Alfonso could, at any time, see how I was coming along and approve as I went along. Well a funny thing happened along the way...after 3 months of stalling and begging him for photos and information...he decided he wanted a redesign.

My first reaction was to charge him all over again but Carme calmed me and told me just to go forward with it. It was not too much work but I just was getting more and more frustrated with his delayed emails and changing of his mind. What started as 5 pages of just HTML blew up to 13 pages, 1 PHP form, 2 flash photo galleries, and a flash title bar...in 3 different languages...which meant a lot of translating...for free. So after 5 months, he finally bucked...and paid me in full to post his site in a week...unfinished. We still have no photos of his employees in one of those flash galleries. Sigh. Also he wanted the whole site in one color...his confederate grey. And each page seems to have a different font, which he requested. Still I am entitled to do the gallery. I have a sinking feeling he will ask me to replace it or remove it. Oh I am going to charge the heck out of him if he wants it removed.

The other site only took two weeks. That I am pretty proud of. I did not design it, but neither did the original web master. When I was tooling around the web for the site owner one day (her name is Andrea and she is from England) we found that he used an $89 template from a popular website and charged her €3000 (about 4600 dollars). She wanted some changes and I made it happen. Now I am her web master so I have some future money coming. Go check it out (auntyandreasstags.com).

I have a meeting this week with another group of people who are interested in having someone look after their site. They are currently using the local boys here, Info G, and they are not happy with their service and timing. Maybe I can win them over indeed. Wish me luck.