The worst nightmare of any developer
I have worked with Zencart for years, and have done many projects, so I was pretty confident and sometimes over optimistic when I take on ZC projects. This proves to be my leads to a rather “deadly” error I made recently.
There is a very great looking store with nice design and tons of features (ajax and all, very very nice) built on Zencart, I will not name the store here for many reasons. The owner contacted us a few weeks ago because the site has compatibility with certain browsers (in short, it doesn’t work on most versions of IE, and has inconsistent display on various major browsers). “This is an easy fix, we have done this many times”, I thought, so I gave a very optimistic estimation.
A few weeks from then, and here I’m still working on this site. The person (or rather, a group of people) who coded this site did not give a care about coding standard, browser compatibility, performance, or anything at all. When I first opened the files, I was welcomed into this dark place, where html, php, javascript all live “happily” together in one place, nested together like spaghetti. Once I fixed an issue, another one popped up and on and on…. In the end, it was decided that fixing thing is more time/cost consuming that re-coding them, so now we are still trying to rewrite almost all the pieces of code for the site.
The moral of the story:
- For me, from now on I will NEVER EVER try to be an overly optimistic estimator anymore, I learned my lesson.
- For you, from now on please check the work of the devs carefully before you approve it. A nice looking apple can be rotten inside. Do you buy a car just because it looks pretty, and don’t give a care about the quality of the engine inside it? If you don’t why do you do that when you have your site developed? Check the code yourself, if you don’t know much about coding ask your friends or a 3rd party company. Or, go with a reputable company that will stand behind its works.
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Sorry to hear about this experience. We have a client on our books at the moment who has used a variety of developers before, some of whom were clearly learning on the job. Although most of it hangs together, it often requires extensive re-writing (usually simplification) before it’s safe to extend the custom functionality, and testing is a nightmare.
Sadly we’re in a business with low barriers to entry. Anybody with a computer and the most rudimentary knowledge of programming can claim to be a developer and undercut those of us who actually know what we’re doing.
I’d add some extra morals to your story for software purchasers:
- The cheapest price often (usually) doesn’t offer the best value.
- Less expenditure now, frequently results in more (much more) in the future.
- Always ask about how quality is assured before placing an order – even if you don’t know the answer, you’ll most likely get a sense as to whether or not the developer does.