MrQwest

Lesson Learnt

13 June 09

Back in January of this year, I was tasked with building a website for a construction company. I couldn’t gain access to the server to make some preliminary tests until launch so I had to make some assumptions on the server specification.

This turned out to be a bad move on my part & I should have really insisted on the server specification before any works started.

Anyway, I went forth & mocked up a design, got design sign off & then started to build the site on my own server using Textpattern (a PHP based content system) & MySQL.

Once all the copy had been produced, all the imagery added and all the tweaks made – I had a complete working site; a finished product on my server. The client agreed it was to go live and I was handed the FTP details by the previous web team.

To cut a long story short, the current server was a microsoft machine running IIS, ASP & MSSQL. This meant that the CMS I had worked on & intergrated into the design wouldn’t work because that was PHP based system. Whats more, I’ve got very little knowledge of ASP or Windows server.

It was truly gutting. The website I had spent several months building, tweaking, changing & nurturing wouldn’t work on the server.

To add even more pressure, the client was due to issue some marketing material two weeks after site launch.

Panic?

Nope. I didn’t want to let the client down so I re-built the website in HTML only (removing the CMS functionality) as a temporary measure and uploaded this to the server. This was done over a weekend & was purely to launch the new website so the marketing material could be sent.

The re-built website was identical in asthetics so once the server had been switched from Windows to Linux (running PHP & MySQL), we could re-intergrate the CMS & the visitor would be none the wiser.

Lesson learnt indeed.

Had I insisted on the server specs prior to commencing works, I could have changed the server over in due course, and uploaded the fully functional website within programme.

Instead, I assumed (never assume – it makes an ass of u & me) that the server ran PHP & MySQL. Because I assumed, the project overran by 4 days. It also required a complete re-build minus the PHP & CMS functionality.

However it was all necessary as it showed the client that no matter what was required, they’d have a working website.

I’ll chalk this one down to experience & I’ll know better for next time!