I paid a visit to a few of my family members out in Beaver County today. They own Wagner's Home Center, a local home improvement store that they built from the ground up over the last three decades. I promised last week at Easter that I would meet face-to-face with them and help them design a web site using my five cents worth of knowledge about web design and search engine optimization. Still, it's nice to help family and it's extra nice to help people who listen to your opinions about what they should do.

They didn't have wireless in the store, but I was able to sit down and crank out the CSS and some of the copy over the course of an hour. I could have kicked myself for forgetting to put any kind of color picker on my laptop because I spent at least 20 minutes tweaking hex codes by hand to build the site color palette. So, the colors look like the came from a very sad crayola box, but I can fix them now that I have returned to the world of modern technology, or once I find a few extra minutes of pro bono time.

I'm just waiting for the domain registration to finally go through so that I can upload what we have now. I promised that I would link to them once that happens, but a screen shot will have to substitute until then. I'll also put up a bigger one when it looks, uh...less bad. Still, it's the thought that counts, right?

I'm a little worried because I only spent a little time explaining how to upload things and make changes to the content. It's a lot to throw at someone who shares an email address with three other people. Still, they were very smart and asked me to keep things simple.

One of my first jobs out of high school was working at a law firm and I made web pages for all of the associates as a courtesy. One of the lawyers one day called me into his office and brought up the Sony home page, which was very slick and white at the time. He pointed to it and said 'I want that!' And to this day I have no idea how that would translate into a legal web page. I was super happy to not have people with the "Whatever you say!" kind of attitude.

We're getting a discount on a new back door from the home center as payment. Clark is excited because the old door was built in the 1920's and was made out of cat hair and hobo dreams. He has spent every winter trying in vain to seal off all of the drafts that seep around the door frame like water through a colander. I, of course, wreck his delicate constructions every time I open the door to check the back garden. He has since given up and takes breakfast in the dining room instead of in the kitchen next to our broken down old door.

Labels: coding, projects

posted by Alison 4/17/2009 12:50:00 AM : (0) comments : splink