My first mock-client.

The client that got me scared and sweaty first, but turned out to be a roller-coaster later.

Everything about this journey of 4 days was a bomb-blast of vulnerability, fear and fun. I had to research, build, design, experiment and what not. There were so many things going on, so many things unlearned, so many things to be applied without my knowledge. But I still managed to do it and did i ace it? I am not sure, but I did it.

So if we were to talk about it in large, I made my website over 4 different days. So it’s best to explain it in large different steps. Right? Before I do that, I will attach some pictures here to show my thought process.

I made the outline first. This simply popped out of my head and went to my fingers that typed it all the way. Time-deciding was more basic than complex, as I really thought I would not be following that.

I drew inspirations from different websites which belonged to my same niche. The website is of a bank that I use a lot in India for my transactions. It was well divided and had many functioning sections within a section that inspired my final website.

I then created a chart of how I would proceed with it. This was not something I referred a lot to, but then it helped me structurize(is that even a word).

I finally decided my platform of coding and reflected a bit on my limitations. Of course when you are given a client with the limited knowledge you have, your mind throws alot of negative reactions on you.

This is how everything went on for the first day and since it was my day-1, all of this counted towards that. There was alot of writing and hooping around.

Day-2

The second day of this task was to pick a client. I initially chose some client out of the list that was provided but then my mentor decided to make my friend my client. Now that my friend was my client, he chose a strange client for me . And then I had to do alot of brain-storming to figure a structure out.

My client was a company that acted as middlemen for people who want their vehicle serviced and the mechanic garage. They wanted a website for more local recognition. And since this client was represented by my friend, he had his own stupid demands. He wanted a google form (my mentor denied it as I lacked knowledge) and a Careers section indicating that they were hiring. The latter part was do-able so I went with it.

I drew inspirations for this from some mechanic based websites. That pretty much Summed up my day-2.

Day-3

This day was tedious and tiring as much as it was rewarding. I began it with mocking some layouts on affinity designer, which I did not know how to use very well. I had to figure out the right tools and then create some visual prototypes. Dividing up a page and filling the content in it is quite hard when you actually get down to it. It took alot of playing around to finalize the 3 most liked designs.

The last design on the right was the one I went with as it was quite a bit more challenging and I felt obligated to pursue it.

Now there was alot of mental debate going on about content, with portions of my brain yelling to go with Chat-gpt, and other portions saying me to do it myself. Guess what? I did it myself. Honestly it did not require alot of head-banging. And I filled the content in Html. Now this is when I truly fell in love with my coding. I wrote the HTML in 1 hour, in a smooth manner. It felt as though I was a natural in this.

CSS, on other hand, consumed the next 3 hours of my time. With placing everything in the right place, right amount of padding, margin, making an inside column that is not breaking everything, UFF. I could not fix 1 thing without breaking something else. There was immense amount of frustration building inside me, topped up with the pride inside me to not ask my mentor for advice, who was literally on the same SOFA with me. Anyways I had to swallow my pride and ask him for assistance after which I came up with the final prototype.

Day-4

Yay, Final day! Almost work done on day-3, just throw some colors and inside column and go live your life in peace. (Disclaimer: Peace is only in imagination, not real-life)

So this day began with me adding colors and inner-column to my prototype. It sounded simple and it surely was, except everything I did decided to break in the mobile version of the site. I was pulling my hair and grinding my teeth to figure it out, but did not waste much time maintaining my ego. I begged for help from my mentor who then pointed out my pain points, and made me work on them. Finally my website was ready to produce.

Conclusion

I realized something, I missed on many things. I decided alot to put into my website, I ended up missing about half of them. My gallery was bad, my visual trick failed, my links are not changing colors when my mouse is on them and nor are the links leading anywhere. But all the dissatisfaction overcame when I finally saw my Mentor’s website. The guy who is now a senior developer, did a shitty job of making a website in his learning days. I felt better. I took a relaxing SIGH! It’s fine. I am not a complete fuck-up. I still managed to do alot of things right.

It was all about learning. It was supposed to make you angry, frustrated, tired. You were fighting an army with a wooden sword. You were not supposed to win, you were suppoed to endure. You had to make do with the very little you have. It was fun and worth it in the end.