I stalled for months on developing the Asphalt site because I knew I had absolutely no idea where to start on it. At every traffic meeting we had I managed to mumble my way past it and find other work to do to keep me/every one else occupied. I figured as long as I could stay busy with other things I could continue to put it off and no one would ask me about it. This just means it was hanging over my head for months. And, honestly, I secretly hoped I’d get a job before I finished it so I wouldn’t have to do it at all because I knew it would take me the rest of my life to finish.
But that didn’t happen.
After my interview at the Cirlot agency, however, I was a little more pumped up about it. I realized that I’d never be able to fully get around web design/development since I’d gone into a career that basically surrounds the web. I needed to bite the bullet and just do it. Like Nike.
So one day I decided this would be the day. I installed the two-week-trial version of TextMate on my computer and began to open the program thinking, “Well this ain’t so bad.” But when I opened it, nothing happened. No magical blank document appeared with an outline of a basic website (not sure when that delusion set in), nothing that connected Safari to my site so that I could see what I was building, no folders of images automatically connected to my document like they were when we opened those files from our textbook cds in class. Nothing. Happened.
“Um…. Wing?”
Wing was my coworker who sat beside me before she moved to LA and was/still is, like, a web design/development queen – and she heard that phrase too many times to count throughout this process. I needed her help before I even got started. So much for doing this on my own.
She got me connected to everything I needed to be connected to and had to help me write the header, body and footer because I’d forgotten in all those months of stalling. Then I was off! It took me a few weeks to finish and quite a bit of help from every single person in the department, but I finished it. After a few set backs and some small design changes, I got it finished enough to hand off to Lee, our programmer. And I can’t tell you how good it felt to hand it off to someone else!
The best part about this project (other than discovering that I still don’t care for web design) was that I learned so much HTML and CSS that, when asked, I can force myself to put together a basic, decent-looking site. And I also learned how to save things and write their code so that they displayed correctly in Safari and Internet Explorer (GAG). People, please stop using Internet Explorer. It’s a pain in the butt to write code for, and I didn’t even get into the complicated stuff!
mypantsaretooshort 
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