In my work as a consultant, it’s important for me to adjust to the speed of the client. If I go too fast, problems appear.
Sometimes I lose them in concepts that seem pretty basic to me, but are new to them. Then later, I have to back up and go over the concepts again. Or I assume that I know where we’re heading, start building technologies, and then get thrown a curveball.
That’s what happened yesterday. A client had been very excited about using a rotating background image on their new site (every page load would pull a new image from a gallery of 3-6 images). Although I’m generally not a fan of distracting backgrounds, we had discussed how to make it work, and it had been a feature of the design since the earliest discussions.
So I jumped ahead… and set up the effect in a WordPress template (using a random image PHP effect added to the CSS, not a plugin). It took some research to find and test the effect, but it worked great.
Meantime, the client had been reviewing design samples that included one background image… and they like it. A lot, as it turns out. So now they want to just use the single background image.
No problem… I can easily remove the random effect. The new site is going to look great. The time I spent on the effect isn’t really wasted (it’s education — except that if I ever need that trick again, I won’t remember how I did it).
In this case, it wasn’t a huge problem… but it does illustrate the balance between being out front and getting too far ahead.
