Confessions of a Reformed Consultant
It’s been a long time since I posted on my own blog. Too long. Shamefully long. So long that I forgot the password to login to the administration area. I suspect I am not the only person guilty of this kind of thing… The well-intentioned blog that falls into almost immediate disuse and disinterest. In my case, I always intended to be an infrequent blogger, a sort of regularly inconsistent submitter. But even this amount of disinterest is beyond the pale.
But I have a good excuse. I have spent the last five months of my life building a *Web site*. From scratch. Myself. In the early nineties, when I started out dabbling in the Internet industry (well, the Internet village at that time), this was not something strange – I created many Web sites myself as a freelancer. But over the last six years particularly, I have been working with agencies, and their clients. But, as a Consultant. As an Analyst. And, previously, as a head of technology. I haven’t written a serious line of code or created a graphic from scratch myself in over six years. And for the last five months I have been paying for it.
But now the Web site lives and it works. So far. I have the bruises and scratched knuckles from months of banging my head and fists against the wall, trying to do things that once were easy, second nature, unremarkable. In the course of five months, I’ve had to relearn everything I once knew and more. As a consultant and analyst, I talked about how to do stuff, but never did it. Prior to that, I didn’t know what to do – frankly, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
This time out, and for this Web site, I knew what I should do, I knew all about Web site design and user experience best practice, but didn’t know how to put the pieces together. I was like a guy from the future with plans for a laser rifle, and trying to build it with a stone chisel and glue made from deer hooves. And my hands felt like hooves, all clomp clomp, ungraceful and unwieldy. Stomping around my HTML, CSS and PHP world, snorting steam from my nose and bellowing (do deer bellow?).
But, you know what. The hooves became hands again, and my fingers stopped bleeding and my eyes stopped aching, and the curvature in my spine straightened, and it all sort of came together. And now when I look at the site I built, I see something far different from sites built before my years as an observer and researcher. Before I suspected there were problems, but couldn’t fix them due to budgetary or resource constraints. Now I *know* there are problems, can describe *why* they are problems, but can’t fix them due to budgetary or resource constraints. :) CM