Frustration and a Learning Experience

Recently I have undertaken my first web design project. It has been an exciting time because it is a step in the right direction for my career possibilities! However things haven’t gone as well as I’d planned and up until yesterday I was starting to reconsider my abilities.

The Problem

Redesign and update the website for a local grounds maintenance company. The link is currently to their old site, so that you can see where I was starting from. Looked yet? Appalling isn’t it? All I had to do was come up with a better design, update the content and add a custom contact form… easy! Self imposed regulations were merely that I’d keep to W3C standards on the new site.

My first designs didn’t go down as well as I’d hoped (in fact, quite horribly, the client suggested that he could have done it in 2 hours, with a blindfold on). Undeterred, I regrouped and came up with a third design which seemed to go down better. A few minor changes here and there and it should have been complete.

Things Go Downhill

Now we come to this week. I received a phone call from my client and could instantly tell he wasn’t happy, still. The fonts are all over the place, he said. There are pictures that convey important bits of information missing, another of his complaints. My company name isn’t even on the page! a huge problem!. I apologised and apologised as he complained, until he mentioned the last problem. This made me stop and think. Why would I create a site for a company without the company name on it? I hadn’t, I knew I hadn’t! At this point I decided to pay my client a visit and try to see what he was seeing.

A Strange Surfing Experience

What was causing the problems with my design? I had tested this website with IE5, 6 and 7, Firefox, Opera and Netscape. I’d even got a screen shot of it in Safari. It all looked fine to me. Until I looked at it through my clients IE6. He was right, the fonts were huge, there was no company name, all the background pictures were missing… the list goes on. There was even problems that he didn’t know about because he had been seeing it like this. There were missing colours and browser standard link colours. I couldn’t believe it. So I took his computer away to fix it. After hours wrestling with trying to reinstall IE6, checking all the options were standard and not skewing the rendering I decided a new browser would work. I installed Firefox and opened it up. To my horror it looked the same. I was all for giving up, handing back his computer and trying to convince him that my site looked fine normally when I stumbled across the accessibility options in the Windows XP control panel.

Solved

I normally advocate accessibility, but in this case I hate it! The computer was set to high contrast mode and was showing huge fonts, no background images and mainly black and white text. Not only my design looked awful, the whole internet looked shocking. Who knows why those settings were in place, but one click and everything looked normal again! On returning the computer and showing my man his website, everything changed! He was delighted and I breathed a sigh of relief.

The Moral

The customer isn’t right! I couldn’t believe that all the problems he had been complaining about were due to how he was viewing my site. Thankfully, everything is much better now… and I’m closer to a pay check!

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