2010 in review: slicing PSDs, billing by the site, and the last of my own CMS

2010 was the year of the fixed-price website: a designer sends a PSD, you turn it into a working site with a CMS behind it, you invoice a round number, and you keep the hosting and the domain on a yearly bill.

That December I quoted a complete build, CMS included, for a four-figure sum that would not cover a fortnight now. That was the market, and it explains most of what follows.

Slicing

The word we used for turning a flat design into HTML. Open the PSD, work out which parts are text and which have to stay images, export the images, rebuild the layout by hand.

What makes it slow is that the design is pixel-exact and the browsers are not. Every build means deciding, per element, whether it can be CSS or has to be a picture: rounded corners, gradients, a drop shadow, a heading in a font nobody has. Almost all of those are still images. CSS3 is supposed to take most of them off my hands, and I will believe it when the browsers I have to support agree with each other.

The iframe as a layout tool

There is an email where I send a client an HTML file with the instruction to drop it in as index.html, containing an iframe. That was a normal answer in 2010. Two systems that could not be made to share a page got stitched together in the browser instead.

Bad technique, and I would not do it now, but it is worth remembering why it kept winning: it was the only approach that did not require both sides to cooperate. Every properly integrated alternative needed someone else to change something, which brings you back to last year's lesson about waiting on other people.

The last year of rolling my own

The biggest thing I shipped that year was the last large site I ever built on my own hand-written CMS. After that the work changes character: instead of my directory structure with my models/ and my config.php, I am working inside other people's systems.

That transition is the whole story of the next two years. I did not decide to stop writing my own CMS on principle. I stopped because a client wanted a system their next supplier would recognise, and I could not honestly argue against it.

Running the whole business

Half of 2010 was not code at all: hosting invoices, domain renewals, payment reminders at thirty days, a client explaining their supplier payment terms. When you sell a site for a round number and then carry the hosting, you have made yourself responsible for uptime forever at a margin you set once, in year one.

I did eventually get out of reselling hosting, and it was right. But being on the hook for the server taught me more about how sites actually fail than local development ever would have.

In short

Fixed-price builds from PSDs, the last large site on my own CMS, and hosting and domains carried on yearly bills.