Stop-and-go, Stop-and-go
The most annoying and frustrating part of web design, by far, is the last-minute changes and updates — either to the completed website, or just to the mockups. Changes to the completed website usually come in the form of typographic changes. Maybe some new text here, use different quotation marks there, etc. Not too bad, but by this point there are so many files the greatest portion of my time goes into hunting down the location of the change!
Mockups are worse! By the time you have reached near-completion on the mockups, you are working with gigantic files. My current instance is a photoshop file that uses 150MB of workspace on the harddisk (the file itself is only 12MB, but so much of that is text it becomes a real beast after it’s opened and all of the text bits have to be rendered into virtual memory). It takes five or six minutes to load up, easy, and navigation in the file is a nightmare.
I’ve got all three of my current projects in one of these spots or the other.
But you know what? These can be the most necessary parts. Ok, so users will never figure out you replaced the word “splendid” with the word “marvelous” — but other little tweaks can be very important. (don’t worry I won’t bore you with examples) And it’s the perfectionism like that, that is what makes clients very happy and makes their users respect them. Sometimes it may not sound like much, but when the change is made, it makes all the difference.