Letting Things Go

This post is going to be more of a rant than anything...

For the last 2.5 years, my husband was a youth pastor for a church in Indiana. Being the pastor's wife, I took on a few responsibilities, one of which being the church's websites. I took the time to design, implement, and maintain both the church's website and youth group website for free.

My husband was let go last month, so I quit updating the websites. I'm the type that hates to leave things undone, so I found a couple people that were willing to take over the updates, and spent some time teaching them how to do it.

I hopped on one of the sites today to grab some information, and found the site had been completely redone, but not by either person I had spent time with. Apparently someone else had been brought in to redo the whole website. My biggest complaint - it is now all in Flash (I have several other complaints as well, but I'm not going into those).

This is a static, informational site. There is no reason for it to use Flash. Flash should only be used for splash pages, videos, and games. They don't even have any special animation that would require Flash. Plus, a lot of nifty "animations" can be now be easily done with jQuery.

So this now brings me to my point. At times in your web designing life, you are going to quit working on projects and hand them off to the next person. At that point, it is no longer in your control, so whatever happens from then on is not your responsibility. But at the point of the hand-off: make sure to keep a copy of the code for your portfolio. I did this, and am glad I did since I can no longer refer to these websites. I'm thinking about rebuilding a couple pages to put up as samples on my personal website.

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