Just put the finishing touches on what may have been the fastest turnaround time I've yet achieved on a freelance mini-site job. About 13 hours fom rough sketch to finished Web-site. That's gotta be a record. As usual, the client needed it yesterday and cost was a priority. Here's the site:
So how to produce a site your client can be proud of without racking up the billable hours? Two decisions I made early in the process proved to have been very much worth making:
- "I'm not going to worry about color."
- "I'm not going to worry about font."
Everything in this mini-site is either black, white or red. And with the exception of the skinny text (Arial Narrow) used in the bottom two lines (and of course, the logo), the only font used for any line of text is Arial.
You never realize how much time a couple of steps in the design process can cost you till you cross them off from the get-go, apparently. Because doing so saved time huge.
I also spared myself the task of going through and consolidating the styles I added to every page into one master CSS they could all link to, but I think at best that would have been an hour, anyway.
The site itself is a verboten frameset sculpture, but how else are you going to get your video to play on every "page" when you know your client has no interest in the added time and expense of hiring an AJAX programmer? Don't even think about iframes -- they don't persist across multiple pages. Which means you can link different pages together each with an iframe displaying a separate fourth page that carries an embedded video file, and when you link to any of the three from any of the three, the video file will start over from the beginning when you click through.
Not so with framesets.
Put the SEO in the top frameset and Google's bots will sort it out. Was considering putting no index no follow code in the head of every other file, but SEO isn't a crucial issue with this site anyway.
And let's face it, it's fun playing with framesets again.
Lets you party like it's 1999 ...
