The final push

Had a nice break in Dublin over the weekend for Gregg’s birthday. But somehow it seems worse when you’re not working, because you have so much in your head that you want to sort, that it’s really hard to relax. Knew I should’ve taken my computer with me!

So it’s quite strange, and very unnerving, that after all this time of designing and fine-tuning the site, we are now at the stage of final amends. Our web programmer is on holiday for virtually all of December, and as we need the site to be fully operational and available to be reviewed by our focus groups from January, we effectively have about 2 weeks left! Eeek!!

We have been booked into his work schedule for this week, and we’ve had to get our final list of fixes and tweaks over to him today. This was quite disconcerting, as we are under pressure to make sure we have covered everything in this list, once and for all!

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been noticing various things on the site, and having ideas by the dozen, and I’ve been trying to keep a note of them in one place, so that when we put this final list of changes to him, we don’t forget anything.

For example, I did the initial draft copy weeks ago, and since I read a book about how I should really be writing it, I’ve been meaning to have another bash at it. But now I know how important it is, I’ve been nervous about the redrafting, and I’ve managed to find other things to do instead for weeks! However I finally got that done and over to him today. I think it’s much better, but I really need to see it on the site before I can tell how it looks. I suppose we can use the focus groups to advise us and change it again if necessary, before we launch in March.

Plus I still know we have a few gaps with the copy. There are some pages where we need to decide exactly how we are going to treat certain things. I’m hoping our meeting with our mentor tomorrow will shed some light on those areas for us.

I’m panicking too about lead times for promotional products and print. We really only have about 5 weeks of working time left before January, so I guess this is the final countdown now. I think it’s just going to get manic from here on in. Hold on tight!

(written on Mon 14th, but not published until Tue 15th due to problems with Blogger)