This job's great... except for the customers...

14:36.40 - Friday 7th May 2004   (Link to This Entry)

This morning I finally got round to looking at an engraver's website I was asked to do, and just about everything was wrong with the supplied files. It's one of those days, huh? Where to start?

To set the tone, the company logo is a .cmx (Corel) file, and I don't have Corel Draw. Thankfully IrfanView displays them, allowing me to copy/paste the image into Photoshop. Unfortunately the logo is 96x25 pixels and dithered into a 13 colour mosaic. Ack! I basically abandon all hope of using this and recreate it from scratch, 1800 pixels wide for good measure.

The product photos were all absolutely huge and all as dull as dogshit. There's absolutely nothing interesting I can do with them - where are the elegant engraved trophies and the like? Nope, not a sossie. All I have is a few pics of printed signs, so I cut one out (a rectangle - woo!) and apply some severe perspective to it to at meast make it look different.

Tip to amateur photographers: If your product is a flat item, please take the photos head-on and let the designer worry about perspective! Thank you.

So with that done I turned my attention to the site content - and more problems. Firstly it was supplied in Microsoft Works format, and for some reason, Microsoft Office will not read Works documents. I have no idea why MS don't simply abandon Works and force everyone to upgrade to Office - that being their major revenue stream anyway - but that's by-the-by. I had to scramble around inside the loft cupboard to find the Works 6.0 CD that came with my laptop and install that. Amazingly, it didn't trash anything.

And then it turns out that the document is entirely in upper case. HNNGH! It seemed an awful lot of effort to go through for a single page that comprised the entire supplied website content, but it was quicker for me to retype the whole damned thing rather than find out how to change it to mixed case in Works.

This site it causing me much pain :)