So, if I'm going to ever have a talk with Troy about this so that he understands how much work actually goes into something, this could be a very good example of updating the website because there seems to be a big disconnect between how much work actually needs to be done, like what there is to do, and what I'm actually doing and why it's taking so long. So the first and very important part is that just changing photos, that's easy, but restructuring the whole website is a little bit more complicated. It's about, number one, I have to understand, well, I'll make these in different points I guess, but there's a lot of things to it, so I'm going to start to just kind of list the important things.

So number one is I need to understand what's actually going on. I'm not in construction, right? I've done landscaping and I'm not stupid and I can figure it out and I can research it, but it's not, like I'm not Troy here. I haven't been doing this for four or five years, I haven't been dealing with the trades, having all these conversations with different people and understanding exactly what it is. So not to mention that, you know, Troy holds a vision for the company. He's the CEO, right? That's his job is to have the vision. So he has this vision and like I need to, number one, understand the vision and understand the context of everything that I'm getting into to figure out how I'm even going to organize the website, what content I'm going to put. So, you know, as an example, like on Saturday we met and I got these, you know, took down whatever notes that I could. Yeah, I get it. Multi-level, mid-rise multi-level is what he's specializing in. You know, some kind of like commercial or strip malls or something or whatever. I get that. He doesn't want to do anything horizontal, civil, but now I guess we're going to do forming and concrete as well. He wants to offer kind of everything, but not doing utilities. Okay, I get that. The list that I got was kind of like just like structural, exterior, and interior finishes. And then it just kind of breaks it down kind of vaguely, panelized framing, stick framing, et cetera. I'm not going to go through the list, but it was kind of a very vague list. So today I had to research that. And aside from structural, exterior, and interior finishes, I had to add, now added site work as well. And that might actually screw me up in the navigation, but anyways, I added site work and I expanded on the list of services. And while I'm expanding on those lists of services, like that probably took me a couple hours just to expand on the services and get it right and research and find out what exactly there is behind it, because I don't, I'm not in his head. I can't see this...

So the next part of this as well is, now that I have this information, and it's pretty valuable, it's like gold, now I have to figure out what pages we have. Okay, that's a really simple thing. We're going to have a home page, a gallery page. We're going to have a page for general contracting, which is going to talk about the fourth section. Add this here, site work as well. We'll have that, the general contracting, which will just kind of highlight. Anyways, that's actually the next step. General contracting, then we're going to have a page for structural, exterior envelope, interior finishes, site work, and then obviously we have our get an estimate page. And I'm getting rid of the about us and contact us because I'm going to merge that onto the home page. So those are all kind of like, those are very easy decisions to make, but that took like, you know, in the back of my head, like 15 seconds to figure out that structure. And the reasoning behind moving the about and the contact us to the home page is to eliminate that additional redundant page. Since we're not really using anything about the team or the clients, I mean, technically, fuck it, I technically could leave it, but I mean, it's kind of like overlapping. Okay, not going to get stuck in my head. Maybe I'll leave the about us page. But see, like there is a bit of back and forth, like trying to figure out, you know, should we, yeah, should we have an about us page and contact us page separate or just merge it onto the home page? The issues are possibly that if we merge it onto the home page, the home page becomes way too lengthy and kind of off key. It's always nice to have a contact on the home page as well, like it's not too bad. But yeah, figuring out those pages and generally what kind of content is going to be inside of them is important. Like you don't want to end up having a page that's just like, boom, one line and that's it and you're trying to fill it. But you also don't want a page that's way too long. So there does take some time...

Now that I have the general page structure, I'm going into the existing website and the blocks that I've already had built, and I'm making an image mock-up of each one. I'm not just going to start coding the website. If I start coding the website, this is going to be a mess and it's going to take forever. So I make these mock-ups. What I do with these mock-ups is I take sections, or if I don't have the section built, then either I code it really quick off to the side, or I just put in wireframe ideas. The idea behind this is it provides a map for each of the pages. If I don't have this map and I've seen this with my guys, time in, time out again. If I was Troy and I had Troy's mind and I knew exactly everything about it, that still might be difficult because trying to keep concise is important as well. But if I'm working on my own project and I know exactly in my head I've been thinking about this for the last week and I already have this mental plan, yeah, I could jump straight into coding and I have an idea of what I'm going to put out there, but I have no idea what's going to go out here. I barely even know the content. I don't even know the text or how much room the text is going to occupy for all these things. I don't know if I'm going to elaborate on all the services or how I'm even going to display all these services if they're just going to be, how they're going to be listed. I don't know anything about that at this point in time. So that's kind of the issue is now I have to plan out all the pages and do these mockups so that everything is balanced, everything is flowed and everything has a spot and everything, there's nothing missing. Because if I start coding it and I go in the completely wrong direction and I'm missing something, that's a lot more work to repair. So I have to make this kind of plan and I have to understand at least what's going to go in the pages and I can develop the rest later, I guess, but I just, I need to know in general what kind of content is going to be on those...

After I'm done preparing all those mockups, then I need to actually start developing the code. So if there's code that I could reuse, that's great. I could reuse a code and plug it in and it doesn't necessarily take that long. If there's new components or new sections that I have to develop, okay, now we start running into more time delays. So if I'm copying and pasting code that already exists or that was already done, great. If I have to make new blocks, that could take a couple hours per block. It's not just quick, wham, bam, thank you, man. It's not like AI can really help because it doesn't have that context window to already see what's on the website. It becomes very complicated. Just adding one section, for example, just a really small section. Like if I wanted to just list the team members, for example, I'd go in there. I'd have my section and I have my container. I'd have my row. I'd have one row that would be split to left and right. I'd have a title and keeping with the pattern of this, I'd have a heading and then the title. Then I'd have a description off to one side. And then I'd have a row and then I'd have to add cards. And then the cards, I'd have to find out what staff are actually there. So that's more research is to find that out who the staff are. And then I'd have to build cards, get an image of them, for example, put their name, put their role, and then a link to LinkedIn or whatever. And if there's more than three or four of them, then I'd have to add a slider. So that one component could be like four hours without even getting information just to prepare the block. It could be like four hours, five hours just to do that. Not even adding photos or anything like that, just making the template. And once I've done that, then I can, yeah. Then, yeah, so the components are the first step. And then I could end up actually coding the page.

Once I'm done coding the page, then comes another hard part for me, which is content writing. I'll farm it off to ChatGPT now, and the SEO on the website is going to get shot down, but I'm not generally a content writer. I get fixated on certain things. I'm not good at creative writing, so I think too logically and not emotionally. I get it, we could always change that, but I have to figure out how that text is going to be structured. Are we going to write a title and then some text and then some bullet points underneath, or is it going to be a paragraph of text, or is it going to be interactive with having buttons? Then I have to work on that inside section and then create the text for pretty much the whole website. Again, trying to be concise in the different sections and not repeating stuff or not contradicting stuff. After I've done that, then finally I put the text inside and I update it.

And finally at the end, now that each section has context, I have to choose images that are good and relate to those services. And so I have to choose images that are either sent as photos to me, or I have to go on stock photos, which means I have to get a stock photo subscription. And, and yeah, and then when I get the photos, it's touching up the photos, cropping the photos, adjusting the light, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to make the photos look better and presentable for a website, which is something that I haven't done in a long time. I've always sourced that out to graphic designers who are actually using this software every day and know the quick tips and tricks. I mean, the software that I use is a dinosaur. It's macromedia fireworks. That shit hasn't been around or used since the early 2000s. I do know Photoshop and I do know Illustrator. I know Illustrator probably better than Photoshop, but I'm not familiar with them. And I don't have the newest version of Photoshop. I'm not paying for that subscription, neither is a company. So I don't have access to the AI tools inside of it. I don't even have a paid version of Figma anymore. So like my photo editing capabilities are limited to either old technology, which is going to take longer and editing each photo for me, like for one of my guys who used to do this, doesn't matter who it was, just the fact that they were using the photos, you know, it might be like a five minute process per image for them to do that and then trim it up into the correct aspect ratio and, you know, get rid of some things. For me, it's probably going to be like 15 minutes per image just to get that touched up because that's not what I do every day. It's, you know, there's a lot more complexity behind this kind of stuff. And it's not like somebody in IT knows how to use every single software. No, everything is different. There's different acronyms for absolutely everything, different software. Figma operates differently than Photoshop. Photoshop operates differently...

Alright, so I have all the page layouts that I think are good enough, and I'm gonna start making them now. I'm gonna need a fuckload of images. Lots and lots of images. I'll have to get a stock subscription.

Yeah, I'm fucking done for the day. I got two pages done. I have four left to go, plus all the images to update, so, and content to revise, and whatever. Yeah, and it's fucking 7.30. I'm getting a fucking migraine now. Still gotta fucking eat. It pisses me off that everybody fucking leaves around 3 o'clock, and everybody gets to talk throughout the day, and here I am, fucking burning away. Fucking killing myself for this. Like, working so fucking hard, I'm neglecting to fucking eat, because I'm so fucking busy throughout the day. I don't eat fucking breakfast until, like, 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe sometimes I don't even eat fucking breakfast, I just skip to dinner at fucking 7.30, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock at night, because that's when I'm fucking finishing, and everybody else finishes at 3. But everybody else is fine. If there's, whatever, if people don't appreciate what's being done and how much work it takes, I'm fucking over it. So, I can't fucking do this anymore. Fuck, there's four pages in the gallery to do as well. No way it's gonna be done by 11.