Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!

All of the political news has got me thinking about Changes.

This year, I hope to be able to build one Web site without redesigning it somewhere in the middle. I think that might be fun.

It hasn't happened yet, and I have been at this for more than a dozen years.

Somewhere along the line I always end up with one of those forehead-slapping "Oh, yeah!" moments, followed by the inevitable tearing-up of a dozen or more lines of markup.

It doesn't seem to matter how carefully I plan, or whether I just jump in and decide to wing it. It doesn't seem to matter if I am working on a site alone, or as part of a committee. At some point it becomes clear that some fraction of the work completed needs to be re-done. I have learned to try to anticipate some of these events, and so my "Oh, yeah!" moments are becoming fewer and fewer, but I still have at least one in every project.

Maybe this is unavoidable, and maybe it's even a Good Thing.

In the olden days of printed materials, everything was set in place and it was expensive to change any of it. But online, it's not like we are burdened with having to re-heat the lead to change a line of type the way Mark Twain did it. If we get a better photo of a different size we can include it in a Web page immediately. We can add or delete text to make it fit into a limited space, adjust the text size or we can leave things as they are and let the browser take care of flowing the text around a bigger or smaller image. And making changes like these does not obsolete a dozen or a hundred copies of the previous work.

Nice, huh? When I was first hired by the University of Nebraska back in 1985 (* Cough! *) I brought home at the end of my first day an entire shopping bag full of paper. Employment contract, job description, parking lot map, faculty/staff calendar, many, many insurance pages and even a directory of every employee and department and college. Here's where the health center is, there is where the credit union is, and so on. There were even pages with coupons for local restaurants, if I remember correctly. Congratulations on your new job, come and have a sandwich on us.

And I was told that there was probably some error in nearly every document of the dozen pounds I packed home with me from Nebraska Hall that evening. Someone got married between the time the directory information was solicited and the time it was printed. Someone else got promoted and moved to another office with another phone number. Parking facilities were demolished to make room for more office and classroom space (sound familiar?) and so on. But this was the packet that every new-hire took home for a period of about a year, when a brand-new and yet still instantly-obsolete document was generated and distributed to everyone.

Today, you get a couple of pages, and a couple of pamphlets. That was it! Everything else has moved online. If you want to know the University's policy on smoking, or snow days, you can check online and get the latest information and print it only if you need a paper copy. And if a coworker gets married and changes her name, that information goes up right away, too. Better information faster, and cheaper. How cool is that, right?

Plans change. People change. Technology changes and with it the various procedures we go through to accomplish various daily tasks. It's good that changing a paragraph today means just that, changing only a paragraph. You don't have to tear down a whole page and re-do everything on it, or every page from that point onward.

So we make a lot of changes because they are both necessary and easy to do. I can live with that, I guess. But I'd still like to dive into a new Web site and work straight through to the finish just one time, without having to back-track and change something that was already done.