KshGoddess's Journal: MOTHERFUCKER.

So, a friend of mine is opening her business tomorrow at the upscale swanky Shops at Briargate (other businesses in the "mall" include Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Eddie Bauer, Coldwater Creek, Sharper Image, etc.) and I just finished uploading her website. No, you may not see it, as it is ... sigh. Let me set the stage.

First, she wants me to use iWeb, which my lappy nor Ben's mini came with, and we go through the whole order-deliver-install thing. I start using it, and want to shoot someone. I tear at my clothing, grit my teeth, and do a passable job using the damned thing, and voila (not wallah, people, really, omg, i'm going to strangle the next person who posts "wallah, my thing that I was knitting is done" ... but I digress) I've got a couple of pages of stuff to post.

I have no descriptions of what things are, but I have some idea of what SOME things are because we had them in our house and photographed them. I have NO clue what the model at her Denver photo shoot is wearing, nor how to describe them, and I got those LAST NIGHT, and the frickin' grand opening is TOMORROW.

So, I asked (sometime last week) for the user/pass to upload the *&(*$@#^&* that iWeb spits out, and got that, yes, LAST NIGHT. But not really. I got some sort of "Account Executive" privilages to the site, but can't figure out for the life of me how to actually PUT DATA to the frickin' thing. She gave me her credentials this morning (which have nothing to do with any sort of user/pass anywhere else), and we'll figure the damned thing out later.

Sigh. So, I put some of her 'model shoot' pix into the site while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on with the "account executive" shit and really, iWeb generates probably the worst code and worst data structure I've seen in a while... but then again, the last WYSIWYG HTML editor I used was FrontPage, EONS ago, so there's my comparison. Actually, I used DreamWeaver once, and remember it being somewhat awful, but this was before Y2k, and I've generally done everything by hand since.

I'm going to be using one of my weekend days rebuilding the site in GoLive, tagging the things that she should be able to change easily (products, featured products, front page photos, etc.), and giving her the "client version". This will let me do things like ... have VARIABLE length/width pages with variable block lengths. It will let me create a BLANK FUCKING PAGE WITHOUT HAVING TO HAVE A TEMPLATE. Even iWeb's "blank" pages have shit on them. It makes me want to scream.

I uploaded all eleventyhundred subdirectories this morning, and the site's up and more or less usable, but with iWeb's directory within a directory structure, its fixed size everythings, and pictures as backgrounds to its fixed-size blocks of text and crap. I understand wanting to have a fixed size whatever due to css concerns, but damnit if I don't want to shoot someone after trying to figure out why the fricking page won't scroll, and my data's being cut off. After finding the Inspector, I was more or less ok with it, but still am relishing being able to dump iWeb into the trash can, and hearing the paper-crinkle of its bits being "recycled".

Stupid iWeb. Stupid Hosting people. Stupid Fetch (which I thought I still had a few days of trial left, but had to buy so I could post). Stupid friend not giving me enough data to actually work with.

I'm going to work out now; my frustrat-o-meter's getting too high. I think an hour of walking nowhere, uphill, both ways, will let me go to work without wanting to kill my co-workers the second I see them.

iWeb is truly awful.

[Some Woman]

It won't let you make a table. I was halted in my website making progress when I realized that my tabular data could not be entered as such. Oh, and also that I could not customize the hyperlink color. I tried editing the CSS file myself, but it didn't work. Also I would need to make like 27 copies of it and place them in the appropriate directories and be sure not to overwrite them everytime I edited the webpage. iWeb is a giant pile of suck masquerading as an application.

Re:

[KshGoddess]

Yep. For each page, it generates a folder for the page that has all the images, css files, etc. in it. Which is kinda sorta rather wasteful when you want to use say, a banner title image on every page, or a unified navbar that's not autogenerated and shoved on the top of the page where you don't want it.

Lesson learned here: don't use crappy tools, even if your 'client' wants you to.