My First Post: There has to come a time in any web designers career when he or she looks ahead and perhaps sees nothing but a long, dark tunnel through a mountain of development hours (or some other oddball metaphor) and wonders just what design is really all about. Why do we do it? The short deadlines, the clients with their constantly changing minds, the blank page. I found myself not long ago so bogged down in the details of design, the mechanics of creation, that I missed the bigger picture of what designing was all about. I’m talking about web design, here. I was there, and so was CodeIgniter.
Changing Frameworks – Changing Paradigms
Don’t get me wrong, now. For creating fast web sites web sites fast (if you get my meaning), it was the best framework and a coder’s best friend – it saved me countless hours of development time for even complex applications – but it still required mind-numbingly long hours of work. Hours I wasn’t spending even considering the design aspect of web design. And there was/is no design framework to make that any easier. So to speed things up, I started looking at ready-made web templates, but then I had to adapt them to work with CI, and that still took many more hours than I wanted, and sometimes in the end, I didn’t really like the template I had chosen. Well, there goes those hours out the window. And then I spent who knows how long tinkering and refining the code, and doing researching to find an answer when I hit a programming wall.
In the end, there was very little profit made for the time spent just fooling around with the damning code and the damned design. Web design suddenly become more than I could bear on my own. So I just rejected the whole thing. Decided I would go back to just graphic design and abandon the web altogether as a medium. That last a couple of months.
Then came the day I found WordPress. It was a revelation, like unto the the day I discovered CodeIgniter in the depths of my despair at writing [X]HTML/CSS from scratch. Sure, I’d dabbled in other CMS frameworks (Joomla, Drupal and some others) but they just didn’t fit in with my gestalt. Too complicated, to steep a learning curve, ugly. Just that – ugly. I needed something that might not be as slim, trim and quick as CI, but something that I could go to sleep at night and not worry about having to deal with the next day. And WordPress seems to be it. It’s lovely, it’s fairly easy to work with, there are scads of fine templates out and about designed/programmed by really talented people, and maybe now I have a shot at continuing to be a web designer without worrying about what’s happening in the basement (don’t know what I mean by that, actually).
So to be, or not to be…a web designer. It’s still up in the air, but I also still have clients with web sites, and all of those based on CodeIgniter. Can’t quite give up on that framework yet, but I now have a fall-back; and once they decide it’s time to redesign their sites, it’s WordPress all the way.
Graphic & Web Designer, Sole Proprietor.
