We’re working under pressure at work to release a sport website covering the olympics for Wednesday, since the olympics start next Friday. And there is still a lot of work to do. I finally understood where the pressure comes from.
There is a page that is not going to be very useful at the beginning of the event and that is not very well designed, but we are getting a lot of pressure to complete it, it’s the page listing the finals. The pressure is quite phenomenal, we can’t release the website without it. So even if we don’t have all the info, the content & co to fill it, we have to find a way to publish it anyway. Now I know why.
It’s because we sold it to advertisers, so the page acts as an ad placeholder, it has to be alive for the date we promised the advertisers it would be alive. That’s the way it is, deal with it. That’s unfortunately what technical teams have to put up with. They don’t know anything until it just drops on their heads. It doesn’t matter if the page is completely ugly or if the content is not ready, or if we didn’t have time to really think the architecture through to produce something clean, just do it because of the money. And all of that for what? Ads that pollute the Ui, the view, the information. I know, eventually that’s what probably pays me, if only I could find a place to work where I can be more creative and less submitted to marketing priorities. One can always hope.
My case just reflects a widespread principle of the web : “do it for ads”. Brilliant people use their maths skills to make you click more on ads, and new services flourish everyday because of that. I think I would be fine with that as long as at least what you produce is of great quality – content-wise and technical-wise – (and still, I generally hate ads, they’re just mind invaders) but making an ordinary page just for ads is only painful. We’re going to do it, but we’re not going to be very proud of it, I’m telling you.
Money, what else, right?
