The other day, I was going here to the site to post another blog article, but was completely derailed from my entire train of thought when I accidentally mistyped the URL to my blog and instead went to www.facingblend.com

The surprise that I saw there was… *cough* surprising.

A few months ago, there was someone, a local glass blower/artist, who was interested in having a revamp done for his website.

He’d previously been working with someone who appeared to have not decided whether he or she wanted to be an asp.net developer or an integrator… the guy/gal definitely was not anywhere close to a designer and towards the end of the project flaked out without finishing and things were broken as well. It was very very broken and very… 90s. It appeared to be like something that I had done back in 1998 when I was just learning HTML and using the online generated button makers…

But it was apparent that the site was built using a lot of raster-based images done as sort of highlights of the glass artist’s work.

In any event, he’d posted on Craigslist as a trade – he’d create a few glass pieces, and the person who he worked with would design and publish his site. Sounded like a pretty good setup to me, and I really love the colors and things that can be done with glass – it looks incredible whether its a photograph or graphically done.

So I created a few mockups and sent him the links. He didn’t respond, so I’m guessing he went with someone else – however what I didn’t realize was that godaddy decided that it was going to use the image and quick code index.html to use that image as the background.

…

I wonder how long THAT’S been there.

So instead of posting a blog about faking shadows (will come later) – I ended up working on a quick splash screen for people to view if they ever were interested in viewing facingblend.com.

Took about an hour to do and 35 min to code the html/css. So check it out if you’re curious. I like it – came out pretty nice and overall, its a whole lot better than the random rough mockup that I’d designed a few months ago.

and for the record – I am well aware of how tacky “under construction” or “coming soon” pages happen to be, but weighing in the pros and cons, I think having a splash screen is far better than having some potential customer’s mockup used to represent my .com