As a perfectionist of sorts, I have high standards of quality. Take, for example, consumer electronics. I will not stand for chintzy plastic buttons that have ben spray-painted with a thick, chrome paint, when an etched metal button or colord plastic button would have been better suited for the job.
I take this same attitude in my professional life. When I work on computer projects, whether they are web sites, building a new computer, or repairing a computer, I take a perfectionist attitude. However, today, I feel I have caved in this respect.
A student created website for a teacher was of sub-par quality for the website. I have been working on the pages to increase the quality of the design, presentation, etc. The pages were full of spelling and grammar errors, not to mention they were painful on the eyes. I personally find it difficult to read neon green letters on a neon green and black background image. I much rather prefer higher contrasts between my foreground and background.
Anyways, I’ve been working on this site on and off for about three months now. Of course, the student feels I have shunted him, ignoring the fact that I have other things to do than fix every bad website I come across, let alone bad student-designed sites. The student finally called in the big guns: the teacher for whom he made the site.
From some of the comments the teacher shared with me about the site ("pretty crazy colors" and "it’s pretty wild, I know"), it sounded like he saw the pages. He asked me to publish the pages, even though I was not finished fixing all of the things I saw wrong with the site. My guess is that the student had been begging him to get the pages up on the web.
So, I conceded and I am going to be publishing these pages to the web shortly. However, I won’t be publishing the pages without protest. The pages are going to go up with little modification. I will rename a couple of pages so that the teacher’s home page, rather than the page for one of his classes, will actually be served as his site’s home page. We’ll see how much of a reaction I get from posting such a horrendous page.
So, I finally finished making those changes to the stupid site late Friday and I posted my much better looking version. It makes me feel better knowing that the ugly version is off the web now.