web development: picking up the pieces

apotheon on 2004-12-20T21:55:59

A new client has a half-built website. It looks like it has fallen to me to finish building it, assuming we get the contract. There's sort of a four-stage process to working on this website in the works, as things currently stand. The stages are:

1. Finish putting together the static, fairly clunky website already in progress.
2. Cobble together the necessary back end functionality of some contact/feedback pages.
3. Clean up code and design work.
4. While the static site is "live", rewrite the entire thing as a dynamically generated site with easy maintenance functionality.
5. Put together an interactive segment of the site, with discussion fora, online support for the client's software product, et cetera.

. . .

I just got called away to view the email that is being sent to the prospective client. I'm not sure of the phrasing the Boss used, in terms of the likelihood of the client's choosing to work with us. I'll hope for the best. He really does need the help. . . .

In any case, if all of the above happens, I stand to make between $2850 and $4830, according to current estimates (and with that wide range of variation based on speculation about what the client may or may not actually want). It's entirely possible that the client doesn't want the interactive site, which would bring the numbers down to between $1650 and $1830. That's a heckuva paycut, but that's also a heckuva lot less work. The interactive site would be more work to get exactly right for the client than all the rest put together, easily, so it makes sense that there would be an attendant drop in fees for me, the worker-bee, on this.

I'm amazed at the lack of good web development workers out there. This prospective client has apparently been through four different web developers that have failed to come through. The current, half-finished state of the site is the work of the developer before last, who got halfway done then decided he had other, more important things to do, and just told the client that he'd have to get someone else to finish it for him. That developer apparently did everything using Adobe GoLive (judging by the meta generator tag), and it shows in the code: I'm concerned to see that in one page the code includes an instance of a dozen linebreak tags followed by a line of forty-eight nonbreaking space character entities. This is a problem.

I imagine I'll be flexing my weak little Perl muscles on this one, for the back end to the contact form and feedback form (if that's what's meant by the "feedback" button, whose attendant web page doesn't yet exist) if nothing else. Whee.

Anyhow, wish me luck. I can use some money.