Rant
I spent the last few days working with a web template for a freelance web job. I might as well have not bothered.
There is nothing quite as frustrating as using a template, the intention being to make life easier, and spending twice as much time flogging it to death trying to get it to work than I would have if I had just coded from scratch to start with. The web designer purists out there are probably chuckling to themselves considering this a lesson learned: code it yourself, code it yourself!. To that I say phooey!
Instead, the lesson here is I need to run my templates through an extensive interview process. Dig a little into their background and life experience. Did they have a rough childhood that’s going to leave me bewildered and confused as unpredictable problems arise? Do they suffer from a lack of formal education, which forces me to go back and comment another person’s code to figure out what’s going on. Or worst of all, is their resume a novel script, the template being nothing but some fancy images that look nice, but the functionality being vapor. The lesson is I might just need to join the world of template maker’s and make some that give you some direction on how to use them.
/Rant
