Website coding - views from two different organisations

So, I’ve been working on a new version of my media directory. Look at the nice changes from old.mediauk.com to new.mediauk.com. Yum. All in all, this is an entire redesign of the directory system, including user-initiated editing of directory entries, and many behind-the-scenes changes to please Google. (I even did the code for Google Sitemaps today.)

I’ve probably spent the equivalent of about two weeks full-time working on this project. It’s been a hell of a lot of work, but a useful thing to have done, given that it’s taught me much more about PHP and mySQL. And two weeks to rewrite an entire website from the ground up is probably pretty good going.

Meanwhile, as an alternative view, over at Martin Belam’s soon-to-be-discontinued BBC-fawn-blog, he’s excitedly talking about the BBC doing a bit of rudimentary customisation on a few pages. Among the choice quotes is: “The project to launch it has been my main body of work over the last few months” - fuck me, a FEW MONTHS? To produce a few customised pages? Bloody hell. I mean, seriously. Are they really clever to spend that amount of time working on a handful of pages, or does someone need a bloody big kick? How long must it take someone there to have a crap: do they need to have meetings and focus groups about the correct way to evacuate their bowels? Blimey. (I don’t blame Martin for this, incidentally: doubtless he’s just doing what he’s told).

(Naturally, when I end up working for the BBC - it comes to us all at some point - I’ll deny I ever wrote this post.)

A view from the future: I started working for the BBC within two years of posting this.