Site Re-Design - Pt I

It all began with a simple idea. My friends and I like to game and we like to create web pages, so why not combine the two interests and try and make a gamer friendly site? Sure there are already 12 other gamer sites on the web – but we’d be the 13^th, and that had to bode well for us, right? So we pooled our skills: Rico took first watch, Dutch grabbed the pencils to do the ‘toons, and I stoked the fire and heated up the VanCamps. After all, you can’t make a web-page without chili.

Our first mistake was trying to use dot-net-nuke to be our document management system. It turned out after months of tweaking and piddling, that we could have had the site out in a month if we’d stuck to what we knew – HTML & CSS.

Our second mistake was in believing that we had plenty of time to work on this kind of thing. I mean really, it all comes down to the core principal I’ve come to live by: My time is worth money. It doesn’t mean that I always get money for my time, but it does mean that I have some imaginary number that I believe my time is worth per hour. This is my Personal Time Wage (PTW).

That is a value I use when people want to use my time. If I’m giving these “free” hours – am I getting something in return that compensates me for this time? And I use it even if I’m the one “wasting” my time.

From a gaming perspective, I think in terms of entertainment value relative to movie ticket prices. If I play a five hour RPG was it at least as fun as the value of a 90 minute $9 movie ticket? (That comes out to a $6/hr “Entertainment Wage.”) I often do a post-game internal evaluation to consider how my PTW compares to my EW. The better the game, the less I worry about this, but if the game is not truly engaging then my PTW may force me to stop playing for imaginary fiduciary reasons.

There’s more to this story – but my son is upstairs screaming for somebody to come read Thomas the Tank Engine™ stories to him. That’s my cue.