The anatomy lesson

I was drafted at work to help finish off a new website for an existing customer. I'm tempted to try and disguise it's nature behind exotic metaphors involving women of the night, but it's late and I can't be bothered. It's another porn site. A brand name porn site, but a porn site never the less.

It's all turned out to be a bit of a farce. I spent until about 9pm tonight fixing the mistakes of other people. The shame of it is that it's all been made vastly more complicated than it needs to be. There's an old adage about an ounce of planning saving a pound of labour and that's perfectly illustrated here. To be fair, it's not the fault of person who's been working on the site. He just doesn't have the experience he needs, and there are few others around who do. Our hiring strategy for the last few years has been to hire programmers first - web experience, of html, javascript and css has been given the short shrift when they're really quite essential when your business model is based around providing web sites. Without giving myself undue credit, I'm easily the person in the company with the strongest of these skills and my absence is definitely hurting them It's something I've pointed out over the last year or so, but it's only now that management is beginning to take it seriously. It's largely why I've called in at this late stage to do something about the mess it's becoming.

And since the site is primarily video based, I've consequently spent most of the day checking pages with various bits of female... anatomy jiggling up and down in front of me. I've tried my best to maintain my clinical sense of detachment, but every once in while something I caught something out of the corner of my eye that startled me a bit. In some ways it's been a revelation (people actually do that? Ewwww...) but on the whole I'd rate it as a thoroughly distasteful experience.

Bleh.