It has been a long time since the last post here on Media Crumb. Seems like the hardest thing to do as a designer or developer is finding time for your own site. The catch is that this is often a great way to communicate with past clients and potential clients who first visit the site. Unfortunately both Derek and I have been really busy with not only client work, but constantly working on updating the long list of site we currently run. I suppose the upshot to this is learning what it takes to run a successful web application, site, or business.

Finding Common Ground with Clients

The biggest change I have experienced with this current work load is learning what the client goes through after we hand the site over to them. Before Media Crumb began creating its own web presence around the net, we were used to simply testing a project, handing it over, and then moving on to the next client. By working on our own sites hours a day, 7 days a week, it is easy to see how building a perfect site the first time around can lead to a less stressful path in the future. That is not to say that trouble won’t arise from projects. There will always be updates, security holes that need patching, and just the general scaling that sites need to go through in order to sustain growth. It does however allow us the ability to see where some of those areas might become a bit easier if planned out in the early stages of the sites development.

Case Study

Currently Media Crumb is working on an update of our older gamers site www.2old2play.com and while the site needs to grow, we are having to jump through a lot more hoops then we needed to. This is a combination of a lot of things including the fact that we just didn’t know the site was going to grow to the size it has. With that in mind, now have to take steps to insure that all data is safeguarded and carried over to our new back end without indecent. Being that the site carries 5 years of information from thousands of people, this is no easy task. Had I known then what I know now (famous web dev words) I would have chose a different platform all together. The trick is to pick the best emerging technology you can and run with it. Jumping on the tail end of tech is a sure fire way to create more issues in the future. It is a developers job to stay ahead of the curve for the sake of not only their clients, but for themselves as well. Needless to say, the majority of our new sites are all create with the latest understanding of web development with the future in mind. As they say, anything worth doing is worth doing right.

The Future

Hopefully we will be able to get through all these updates and client work to find a little time to write a bit more on the Media Crumb homepage. I also know that we are in desperate need of a new redesign as this one was put up in a rushed attempt to create a presence on the web. There is a post in there somewhere about why rushing something is almost certainly a way to fail at it, but I’ll leave that for another day. In any case I hope Derek and I have a chance to talk a bit more about our experience with client and personal work a bit more, but for now I’ll just leave you to your comments. Thanks

J