One of the things that I have been working on in my life as a web designer/developer is website maintainance for a startup in downtown Seattle.

When it came time to give the site a facelift, a few great graphic designers came up with a cool but complicated desgin. It was then handed off to an outside firm,Flying Machine Development, Inc. with the goal of  developing both the website and a CMS to go with it. I was supposed to just do the usual maintainence, create new pages if needed, etc.

Well, I thought, I bet we are going to get some fabulous state-of-the-art website designed with css and maybe a little unobtrusive javascript thrown in. I was so wrong!

What we got was an unfinished CMS that works only in IE7 and removes embedded javascript, seems to have almost no usable error checking (code with errors just doesn’t save – no messages displayed). If that wasn’t enough grief, the code itself uses old-fashioned table layouts, has errors like mismatched tags and doesn’t validate. I don’t even want to think about the fact that pages were not complete – buttons with no code behind, only 1 page of a 2 page signup process.

All of this has made me very unenthusiastic about working on the project but I am trying to bring myself to an attitude adjustment since I know there is so much left to resolving the issues on the website.