Starting with simple

A friend who is completely technologically unable and a great painter asked me to help him create a website. Having cleaned up his various content files, a few days ago I made a start on the presentation, and heavy going it was too. Although he really wants only a very simple site, I began by trying to simplify an extremely powerful, all-singing, all-dancing framework. It was incredibly difficult, with bits of markup being injected from who knows where and doing who knows what. Very frustrating indeed, to the point where I was beginning to regret having agreed to do it.

Then I had a revelation.

What if, instead of trying to simply something complicated, I created something simple from scratch? I’ve always imagined that to be extremely difficult, but the truth is that this site needs only two kinds of page, one as a kind of index and one as a showcase. How hard can that be?

Not very, is the simple answer, and in half a day I achieved more than I had in two days before. The display works, although I still need to add pagination and add various filters. Of course they don’t look like much, yet, but with the structure and function in place, that part will be reasonably easy.

I’m pleased, both because I realised I needed to come at the problem from a different direction and because I learned enough to do so.