Understanding how development works ...
Hi!
This post is for me to understand the process of coding.
I was in charge of administrating a web site, and to make sure the developers from the firm we used did what we wanted and needed fixed to be done.
In the link you'll see the front page and as a hero you see a gliding carousel of different upcoming performances. My questions are:
1. In the Figma design this should be a slow and continuous gliding carousel, and not with rests for each performance as it is today. When we asked for this to be done the development firm said that this would take several weeks to fix, and that it would cost several thousands of dollars – that was money we could not use for this, so we opted for this half-way solution with the rests (I live in Norway which explains the prices ...).
When I asked why this would take so long and cost so much, the answer was that the "package" used to create this carousel wasn't made for continuous gliding. So my question is: Is this really true? Would this take several weeks and cost so much to fix? And if not, how could it be easily fixed
2. I showed the code for the entire page to an associate professor of IT here in Oslo. He's immediate response, with no leading question was: Oh, that was complicated, I wouldn't build a site like this ... I wasn't in a position to really dig further, but have been thinking about this ever since.
So what did he mean?
https://www.baerumkulturhus.no/
Store kulturopplevelser | Bærum Kulturhus
Velkommen til et av Norges mest kreative og varierte kulturhus. Vi viser det beste av dans, jazz, klassisk, smak, barneforestillinger, og kjente navn.
2 Replies
When it comes to asking for changes, my first question would be, what did the contract stipulate when it comes to changes/fixes?
They used an existing plugin for the carousel (this makes sense, no one would do it by hand). If it was well communicated that it should be one single animation without any pauses, and what they used can't do that, to me they made a bad decision... but that said, it seems like they went with glidejs, which I'm not very familiar with, but looking quickly at the documentation, does seem pretty easy to customize. One issue does seem to be that it's not an "infinite" scroller though, so it doesn't make a big loop back to the start, it reaches the end, it just jumps back to the start, which I think isn't what you're after.
Because of that, they are probably right that they would need to pick something else... so it would come down to the communication over how that should work and the approval they got along the way, really. To me, they might have picked up something that wasn't the right tool for the job from the start.
If final payment has already been made and they insist this is out-of-scope from the original project, I'd ask them for a detailed estimate on updating it where I ask them:
- What plugin/package they are changing to
- How many hours they are estimating the change to take, with a breakdown of what those hours will be spent doing, because "weeks" is them either not wanting to do it, but putting a high pricetag so if you say yes, it's worth their while, or they're just price gouging.
If you have all the project files and they've already paid for it, I'd be tempted to hire a freelancer to update it, rather than continue to work for them, if you can't get them to do it at no cost.
Hi, and thanks for a thorough answer indeed!
The deal for the new website was done with a design firm, which contracted out the dev part to a subfirm, which also ran the administration. This was a huge and complicated deal, but that's another story all together.
But the deal was made with the design firm, all the designs was made in collaboration with them, and they gave us finished Figma-sketches which we approved. On those sketches it was clearly explained that the carousel should be continous. That was what we understood the subcontractors would dev based on.
When they deemed it finished, several things were not as the sketches implemented, but that's for my old bosses to sort out. I don't work there anymore. Just really curious about the "impossibility" of changing it from resting to continuos.
So it seems to me there was bad communication between the design firm and the dev team from the subcontractors. We had no hands on the wheel during dev, we were just given the final product, and then had to iron out all the things that didn't work. Since this was a main element on our front page, this annoyed us quite a bit, if not from a UX / UI perspective, but at least for the principle of bein given what we had signed off for.
I love the questions you suggest. Cause that's the kind of stuff I wasn't in any position to ask about earlier. Now I feel more comfortable asking that after studying you and other experienced dev for close to 9 months.