I want to perform an exercise.
as some of you know i own/run a web development company.
I am going to show you 5 websites over the last 5 years that we have programmed. I want you to look at the sites for no more than 5 seconds and i want you to make a judgement on which is the most complex to program:
Site 1:
http://adyok.com/17181/intro
Site 2:
http://www.recruitlook.com
Site 3:
http://adyok.com/18005/main.php
Site 4:
http://adyok.com/pivonote
Site 5:
http://adyok.com/bret (this isn't done but best serves the purpose of the post)
I know already which sites you are thinking either one of the 2. either site 1 or site 4. This is what I do everyday I know how clients react to certain sites.
And while neither of the 2 were easy to program, in particular the Japanese adult site, that client was the worst client i have ever had in my life on top of the site itself just being ****ing complex... neither of them come freaking close to being as complex as the recruit look college recruiting site. not even remotely close. To date that's the only project I have taken and half way through had second thoughts about could we honestly do it or not.
first, the site has 75 databases. seventy ****ing five. To put that in perspective, the adult site has I think about 21-22, the music social networking site has 9. The other adult site only has 7 because of the way the site is setup with the merchant hosting the client information or what not. 75 lol. For each job for each programmer I compline a checklist of what has to be done for the work. most are a half a page long, on a daily basis this would be 4-5 pages. The custom built search engine the site has alone took 2 weeks. Mind boggling ****. Once we completed this site i knew there wasn't anything we couldn't do.
That however is just half the battle. that's not even what makes it so hard. what makes it really hard is that the site is programmed in cake php which is regular php on steriods. not a lot of guys know cake PHP which means trouble shooting the work is a *****, and things you expect to work a certain way in php don't necessairly work that way in cake php. but beucase of the database issues the site has, cake php was the only viable option
now, i don't make this post to brag or whatever, i wanted to illistrate a simple point. I didn't say which site looked the best, i didnt' say site was teh most appealing, i said the most cmplex to program. I am well aware recruit look looks like dog **** lol. the cake php is so impressive that it doesn't matter to the clients that i want cake php jobs from. However, do you know how many guys i speak to a week/ month/year that email me and say hey man, i got this really great design already i don't need design work, but this site is complex out the AZZ man I need some heavy hard core coders, and i send them the list of what i consider to be our best / more complex sites, and 19 out of 20 times, they are going to pick, you guessed it, the social networking site or the Japanese adult site, even though those are not the most complex things we have ever done. lol the recruit look site is so complex it allows you to not only upload videos, it allows you to create your own mixed video tape ON THE ****ING SITE LOl. you can do it from your login/user profile. but yes this social networking site where a guy can send a picture to another guy is more complex than this lol,. it's just prettier.
and just dealing strictly with social networking sites, if you emailed me and told me i have a gun to your head, show me your most complex social networking site you have built.. it's withotu question the bret site. that site has layers of functionality that are so deep. but while it's not ugly, it's not as pretty as the music social netwokring site. but no one is as impressed with it as the music networking site. we programmed that music site in about 2 weeks once the design was done. we have been workign on the bret job for 4 months and we aren't done. we're about done but we aren't done.
business has taught me the important of looks. your look matters. even people who aren't concerned with looks, are concerned with looks they just dont' know it. it's subconscious. people aer attracted to aesthetically pleasing things.
