I have found, though, that often, the time I take being sidetracked to an interesting website, or looking at something fun that a friend or colleague has sent me, has a great benefit to my productivity and work. Why? Because creativity, like fire, needs oxygen from the surrounding environment. The stimulation and things that we discover by looking up and around can add to the quality of our work.

Here is an example: I just reprogrammed an artist’s website, Beldan K. Radcliffe (beldankradcliffe.com). We were keeping the graphic design pretty much the same as her original site, but programming it with SEO friendly code, and adding a shopping cart and tile section. The last thing on my “to do” list for Beldan was to figure out how to create a page where shoppers could “play” with her tiles and arrange them to figure out which ones they want to purchase. She sells a set of four tiles at a discounted rate, and she commented that at her artisan shows, people spend hours picking out tiles and arranging them together to decide which they want to purchase. I had absolutely no idea how I would program that for her. So this final task stuck in the back of my brain as something I needed to get done, but wasn’t sure how to tackle.

One day soon after I was busy working on numerous things, and my friend and colleague, Kathleen Forsythe, shot me an email with a link to a website that she thought was inspired.  The subject of the email was “how cool is this..” and the link was to this page: http://www.curiousgenerationgroup.com/

I went to the link, and finding it inspiring, I looked at the source code to see if I could figure out how it was created. I noticed that one of the scripts that they use was located in a folder named scriptaculous, and doing a google search on that, I found this site: http://wiki.github.com/madrobby/scriptaculous/. The site explains that  script.aculo.us is a set of JavaScript libraries to enhance the user interface of web sites. (TRANSLATION:  free javascript code that, once installed on your server, lets you do all sorts of cool things)  AND one of those very cool functions was the ability to drag and drop items on a page. Suddenly I had a solution to my tile task for Beldan, and with the scriptaculous files, was able to get her new page up in under 1/2 hour.

I was rewarded for my exploration. Exploring is a way to self educate, to stimulate our creativity.

Not all distraction is bad. If I hadn’t taken 10 minutes to open that email, click on the link and look at the source code, I would still be stumped on how to create a page where customers can re-arrange items, and that unfinished task would still be rattling in the back of my brain.

Have you had similar experiences? Let me know by commenting below.

I am not talking about visual differences, though there are some – websites are designed for a higher screen resolution today than they were five years ago, for example. I am talking about the nuts and bolts programming of the site. The code that makes it work.

Today’s programming is designed to load faster, be easier to maintain and to be search engine friendly. Although each of my website projects  are programmed to the website standards and SEO standards of the time that they were built, and I take classes every year to stay at the top of the programming curve, I have been programming websites since 1997 and my portfolio contains some sites that are old school programming, because of their age.

I am mentioning this for several reasons, the first is that I had one of my favorite clients come to me, whose site I designed back in 2003 with a custom content management system, and they had hired an SEO consultant to look at it and give them suggestions. When the consultant looked at my code, I was embarrassed, and I felt like saying – wait, don’t judge my present skills on what I was programming seven years ago! It is like comparing the mud pies I was making at 10 to the apple pie that I cooked at 17.

I did agree with my client and the consultant that it was time to gut their site and reprogram it. It looks the same as before, but now it has SEO friendly code and URL’s, and the content management system has more SEO functionality programmed into it. The renovation was quickly done, because I knew the site inside and out and had programmed the custom content management system so was familiar with how to transition it for today’s needs.

This is a somewhat defensive and personal rant. I don’t want to eliminate my older sites from my portfolio, but the second reason I am writing about this topic, is that I’ve had them (my older sites) held up by my competition as examples of how I program today, and that is vastly unfair. I hope that when a potential client looks at examples of a web programmer’s work, they would ask to see the most current work that a programmer is doing. I want to reassure my clients and potential future clients that I do program as search engine friendly as any programmer available for hire.

I have gone back and re-programmed a handful of client sites this year, bringing the code up to date with today’s standards, and hopefully the majority of my clients will revisit my services so that we can renovate their sites as well.

After 5 years, it is really time to look at a site’s code and decide if it needs to be gutted, to look at the design and decide if it needs freshening up. To evaluate what was working and what isn’t working anymore. There is no reason why you can’t work with the original designer and programmer of your site to do this. They can probably do a more efficient renovation for you (translating to less money), because they already are familiar with your site and content management system (if you have one).

By the way, in my website portfolio, my most recent projects are at the top. : )

Are you a website programmer? Do you recommend removing old sites from one’s portfolio? Have you had old work held up by your competition as a reason not to hire you? Please share your experiences by commenting on this post.

My work can be like that too. I have had projects given to me that at first glance seem tedious, but once completed I realize that they have been a vehicle for an incredible journey. They end up teaching me new things, introducing me to new people, challenging me to learn. Each website that I design and/or program has brought me gifts. I am very grateful for the work that I do.

Have you had experiences where something that you dragged your heals at, or dreaded, ended up being a blessing?