Introduction

In January, a friend of mine approached me about creating a web page for his small business. The business, Sunset 76, had a domain name and some kind of shared web hosting package, but the previous operator had essentially abandoned it. The result was a largely blank page with some blurry JPEG images (mobile) that reflected poorly on Sunset 76.

I’m not a huge web guy, but I agreed to help. After all, the needs of a small business generally don’t involve vast web applications or services. Really, the only thing the business required was a single static web page answering its customer’s most common questions.

The Problem

Basically, there were two problems involved in building a web page for Sunset 76. First, I needed to write the page itself, write the stylesheet, and create any images that the page required. Second, I needed to wrangle the hosting service, Turbify, and convince it to display the page rather than one made through its builder.

Sunset 76’s new page needed to meet only the most basic requirement. It needed to look more or less professional. That meant no blurry JPEG images and a responsive layout that would look presentable across devices. Additionally, I needed to acquire any resource files myself.

Handling Turbify shouldn’t have been an issue. Uploading a file to a web server and configuring it to serve that same file should be easy. Unfortunately, Turbify’s web interface has some issues. At least on my end, pages that should exist don’t (e.g., their cPanel interface is intermittently inaccessible), links in documentation go to missing pages, and there’s no clear way to disable a web site created through the builder application.

The Solution

Writing a static web page isn’t an especially complicated task. The hardest part is writing a stylesheet that looks good independent of the device displaying it. Even then, writing a sufficient stylesheet is mostly just time-consuming rather than cognitively challenging. In addition to HTML and CSS, I prepared images and typefaces for Sunset 76. I prepared the logo, under advisement from the client, using Inkscape and chose Fira Sans for the type. I also prepared additional images by rendering PDFs provided by the California Bureau of Automotive Repair into appropriately sized PNG images.

Getting Turbify to behave was a bigger issue than writing the web page. When I’ve dealt with web hosting in the past, it’s always been using a dedicated server that I could access using SSH. Unsurprisingly, in a shared hosting environment this is a no-go. Instead, I needed to do everything through Turbify’s cPanel. I don’t think this would have been so bad except that it was only accessible occasionally. Uploading the files wasn’t enough though. I still had to rewrite an .htaccess file to make the page visible. I’m not big on Apache (Turbify seems to actually be using LiteSpeed) so I had to learn to do that.

Thoughts

This was a pretty simple project and, for me, the real lesson was about technical debt. Sunset 76’s biggest problem wasn’t creating a functional static web page. Rather, its biggest difficulty was working around past decisions. I’m sure that, in the past, Turbify made sense. It probably didn’t require paying someone like me, and I’m sure that was a big plus in a world where most small businesses had a minimal web presence. Now, in a time when a web presence is more crucial the consequences of that previous decision need to be paid off.

In an ideal world, I think Sunset 76 would have ditched Turbify completely. It’s better to pay off all of that debt if possible. Realistically though, business needs to go on as usual, and I wasn’t contracted to reimagine Sunset 76’s IT situation. That’s just how commercial projects are. It’s that way even between friends. It would be nice to return to this some day and go for broke. Right now though, I’m content with the result.

This project started in January but, for various reasons, had a long hiatus until recently. I don’t mind, especially to help a friend, but I feel like this project somewhat interrupted my flow. Prior to returning to this, I had started on a NCURSES based game project. Hopefully, in the near term I can focus on that project. I’d like to get at least a demo completed and available before moving on to anything else.