Magzalez’s eyes on media

I recently finished a freelance job I did for a UF fine arts professor. He asked me to turn his print, tenure package into a Web site. So I did.

I’m not exactly gushing with pride over this site, but I’m glad I did it. There are a whole mess of things that fly in the face of standards, validation and good sense, but hey, I was working with a certain customer who needed a certain finished product displayed in a very specific manner..

Some peculiarities of the job:

• Ridiculous, but I mean re-DIC-ulous amounts of content.
• Mr. Offerle was the first person I’d ever met who actually had javaScript disabled on his computer
• I only had 10 days to put this site together
• Much of the work came from ripping videos off of DVDs, cutting them into snippets and making them Web ready.

Things I am embarrassed about on this site:

• Does not validate: This is the first site I’ve made in a long time that doesn’t validate. The problem was that because he had javaScript disabled and his audience was a bunch of viejos whose computer settings couldn’t have been much different, I couldn’t use .swf object to embed video players or audio players.
• Doesn’t use a CMS: This site was a prime candidate for using a CMS, and with all the work I am doing with TextPattern I could have done it easily. The problem is that I only had 10 days to set up the entire site, edit all of the videos and audio, burn DVDs of the videos, make photo galleries and input the massive amount of text. Time just didn’t allow.
• SoundSlides demo: When crunch time came around, I needed to make some photo galleries. Unfortunately I didn’t have a registered copy of SoundSlides plus at my disposal. I had to do with the very cheap, very ugly and very stupid alternative of using the demo and dealing with the “This was made with SoundSlides Demo Version” sign. It goes away pretty quickly, but it’s up just long enough to make me want to vomit.
• I must have spent close to 70 hours in 10 days on top of my regular 40-hour work week.

Things I’m happy about:

• I got paid
• The customer really liked his final product
• I made some contacts, got some referrals and learned a bit about the world of freelance in terms of the Web.