As fate would have it, just after our web site leapt into the world of smartphones, tablets and a virtually unlimited array of screen sizes, the software company we used to create it died. This was no slow death, where development stops and the software gradually becomes obsolete. This was sudden death, where even the developer’s web page went from extolling the virtues of the program to a text page saying goodbye. Forever.
Meanwhile, I was getting a lot of calls from web experts. The site wasn’t really responsive, it needed a “modern” look (so it would resemble every other site out there?). For a paltry $1200 per year or more, they could save me! I listened to their critiques, took notes, read their free analyses and put them aside for the next rewrite.
Now the search was on for a new love, a program that would get out of the way and let me do anything I wanted. Something with a beautiful interface. No involved processes to slow down the workflow. No coding beyond the basics. As someone once might have said, dammit, Jim! I’m a landscape architect not a HTML and CSS coder.
The dilemma came between coding and visual design. I didn’t want to give up all control and flee to the world of look-alike template based web design. There are a number of design based web authoring programs out there, with widely varying prices. But I didn’t want to spend hours finessing code – after learning HTML, CSS and probably JavaScript in the process. Dammit, Jim!
I watched software demo videos. Some said, “simple” yet after 20 minutes they still had not shown enough where I felt confident that I could jump in and do something. Another seemed affordable, but when I looked at all the extensions it required, it wasn’t such a bargain after all. Besides that, I never found the video for three column text even though it seemed supported – or did I need an extension?
After all the fuss, I finally settled on Sparkle. It wasn’t for the name, but they’re based in Italy. Still, “scintillare” isn’t any better, so I’m guessing it wasn’t a translation.
I liked what their developers wrote, where artistic, visual design is getting squeezed out in favor of geekiness and coding. The idea is to leave high geekiness to developers and allow designers to concentrate on the look and feel of a web site.
This was underlined when Annette attended a meeting on creativity and graphics, where someone mentioned that it’s almost impossible to find an expert coder who also has a sense of graphic design. Under this paradigm, you would need a minimum of two people to create a web site with any artistic feel: a coder and a graphic designer.
So, it was back to the drawing board. I had all the elements for the site: images, text, ideas for parts I wanted to rewrite and simplify, other ideas to clean it up a bit.
The now-defunct program had become quite cumbersome, a slow zombie of cobbled together routines and workflows secretly waiting to die.
Now I had to take all the pieces and put them together using new workflows, new developer logic and new functions. Sparkle is still relatively new, so there are things you can’t do, like adding captions to slideshow images. The upload function doesn’t always work – sometimes the site got an update, sometimes it got a bit scrambled.
Luckily, the Sparkle people did put a lot of thought into workflow, making it much, much faster to develop a site. Previews were now live, on a browser with updates in real time – no recompiling and waiting!
I now had access to web fonts, so type could remain the same everywhere, theoretically.
Embedded video finally worked! Instead of constantly overflowing images on smaller devices, they actually adapted to the phone’s screen. I could even add captions and text around the videos to give more depth.
The contact form actually works, just like all the Big Boys – and I didn’t need to force anyone to use Captcha (one of the least elegant solutions anywhere).
So far, I’ve done a fair amount of web design in Sparkle, and it’s done a good job of letting me design what I want. Annette is less thrilled (she was using another zombie program, iWeb, which mysteriously ate all her portfolios). She really wants captions!
Hopefully you’ll enjoy the new (again) look and feel of the site. If you do, drop me a line sometime.