Poll: What do you do when you can't design?
This is a problem that is sure to come up for everyone building Web pages. There will come a day when you can't do what you had planned to do or wanted to do. So you'll have to do something else. For me, this normally turns into a day of information architecture. I focus on information architecture because my site topic is huge. And there is always something that could be better showcased or found more easily. I get really frustrated when I'm asked to write an article that I already have a series of articles on. That means that those articles are not being found.
But there are lots of things you can do on a Web site that don't involve design work. You could work on building content or run a link checker or find some new color palettes to try when you can start design work again.
What do you do to improve your site when access to it is down? Sometimes the best thing to do is step away from the computer and enjoy the unexpected free time.
Last night, my web and email servers stopped working. The BlueHost web site had a notice about a transformer that blew up. Guess they don’t have colocation, whaddya expect for $6.95/mo, sh_t happens.
I host not only my personal site there, but three other sites in dev in subdomains – all inaccessible.
So I turned to a different project running on a different server. Then that server stopped working – so I took a dinner break.
After dinner, both servers were back.
When I’m not working I’m usually posting comments here, or at The Webmaster Forums or answering questions at drupal.org or answering questions at LinkedIn
Or maybe I’ll just go out for a bike ride on the bicycle I found next to the dumpster, excellent running condition
I recently went through a similar situation where everything I had to do depended on client feedback, so I was sitting here for days “on hold” with lots of energy and nowhere to direct it.
So I learned how to install Wordpress locally on my laptop. That allows me to work on the templates of projects currently running in the background, while tweaking plugins. When it comes time to move those projects to the active shelf, it will simply be a matter of dragging my template and plugins folders to the live server rather than starting from scratch the day WP is installed live.