Today has been one of those really busy days where one minute it is 08:30am and the next it seems to 21:00 hours. I am currently working on a web based bespoke programming solution for a client and it is one of those jobs where you really appreciate how much planning can help a project run smoothly.

Without going into too much detail and breaching the clients confidentiality what at first appears to be a site needing about 20 pages does in fact require somewhere in the region of about 150 pages by the time you have worked through all the “minor” functionality that the site will need such as a reset password page.

The database itself is relatively simple and did not require a lot of effort to normalise the data.

At the moment I am focussing on the back office functionality. It has been secured and the pages are starting to roll out. It is however very functional and I have not really considered anything about the eventual look and feel of the site so that I can focus on making the site work before applying a bespoke template and stylesheet to the site.

I have also this evening finished off a design for another clients site. I say finish off, what I actually meant was started over. I spent a couple of hours working on the design last night and I am not ashamed to say that I have had a real block with coming up with something suitable for this site. Finally I started to feel that things were coming together. I had changed the logo, the colour scheme, the layout of the menu, you name it and I had changed it.

I looked at it and thought to myself “It might not be perfect but it’s a lot better than it was earlier”. I was content with the design if not necessarily completely happy with it. Then disaster struck and my PC froze. There were phrases such as “Oh dear” and “Gosh, that’s rather inconvenient”, or words to that effect as I realised I could not save the design. Having racked my brain for what I could do, I even considered taking a picture of the screen with the camera on my iPhone to at least give me some idea of everything I had changed, I eventually sloped off to bed feeling rather dejected.

I left the PC on over night hoping that it might sort itself out during the night and I could save my work in the morning. Duly the sun rose today and I sprang out of bed, showered and then went into my office to see if I could rescue my work. Alas I could not save it. The design was still there on my screen and I felt that my PC was in some way taunting me. I did the only thing that I could, took a deep breath and turned the PC off and then on again.

The bright light that shone out of this is that this evening I was able to recreate the design from scratch and indeed made a number of improvements. I was grateful that I had been writing the colours that I used down on paper and so I could get the look and feel back to how I wanted it.

There are two lessons that any aspiring web developer can learn from my experience today:

1. Make sure that you plan your projects properly. The time it takes you to paln things properly will be more than compensated by the fact that you will run into far fewer unexpected situations when you do start to code.

2. Make sure you save your work regularly.

By following these very simple rules not only will your jobs run more smoothly it will probably help prevent you from suffering from high blood pressure!