Long Weekend

The wife and I had planned to go camping last weekend since we never (ever) go on little vacations by ourselves. We were going to pack up the dogs and head to the North Georgia mountains for a much needed break from our very hectic lives. Last Friday, as we were eating dinner, we decided it would be a good idea to check the weather. While not terrible, the forecast of scattered thunderstorms put a damper (pun intended) on our plans. The fact that our dog is very neurotic and freaks the fuck out when hearing loud noises clinched it: no camping for us.

So, there we were. Staring at a long weekend with nothing to do. We briefly entertained the idea of heading to my parent’s house in Florida, but the thought of a 12 hour round trip car ride didn’t sit well with me. What do do?

Our conversation drifted from this dilemma to talk about her jewelry business. She had been on my back recently about the lack of progress on her web site. The site consisted of a simple slide show that I had put up about a year ago. It was one of those things I had been meaning to get around to, but something always came up. Now that we had a “free” weekend, there really was no excuse. We decided right then and there that we would spend the weekend knocking out the web site and check this looming task off our (well okay, my) list.

So, after spending a quiet early Saturday afternoon, we got to work. I fired up Photoshop, we brainstormed a simple design, choose some pretty colors and discussed the navigation elements. Since we decided that anything we came up with would be better than what was currently out there, the process moved very quickly. We didn’t think about anything too long or agonize over simple details. Before we knew it, we were looking at a fairly nice looking web site design.

With the design pretty much decided on, I started to cut up the graphics and lay out the home page using HTML and CSS. Once that was up and looking halfway decent, I started to work out a simple navigation component for the photo gallery. I spent a few hours creating some tables in a MySQL database to hold the gallery info, played around with that for a little while and then headed off to bed for the night.

The next day was spent pulling out components into PHP include files and creating some logic for dynamically changing out the navigation elements depending on which page you were on. I also cropped and color corrected photos of her jewelry for the gallery and created the directory structure of the site. A previous freelance project I worked on had a simple contact form that I had written in PHP. I went and copied that code into our site and after literally about 5 minutes had a fully-functioning contact form complete with error checking and a thank you screen. All of the site content had previously been written up, so I just cut and pasted that into the pages and, voila, (semi-) instant web site!

Erin used to always ask me why I didn’t link to her web site from themuy. The answer is I never wanted to because I was ashamed of my progress on it.

Well, not anymore. Here it is: Erin May Jewelry. I think it’s pretty good for about 2.5 days of work. I haven’t done a lot of browser debugging yet, so if you find something amiss, please let me know.