I’ve decided to abandon metroMe and am now working on yet another website design codenamed miniMe. I’ve also decided to blog the entire process of development. So this article is the first of many that I’d be posting (fingers crossed) in the coming days.

If you don’t know what metroMe is, it’s because I never made it public. It was a website I had developed using a heck load of external dependencies. Now when I am starting afresh, I think it’d be better to tell you - what went wrong.

Firstly, I didn’t have a set plan when I started it. I was overly obsessed with “Metro UI” and just happened to find metroui.css project. So I thought why not create a metro based website just for the fun of it and the project started with no ‘needs’ whatsoever, purely driven by coding ecstasy.

Take a look at the metroMe codebase and there’ll be just one word on your mind: Shit, because that’s what it is. The entire site is based on the metroui.css framework which in itself is a 6000+ lined css files. So every time I had to change something, I’d just add new code rather than modifying the original (which would’ve been a mind boggling task.) As a result the website is filled with hacks and fixes which hold it together, imagine wearing a tuxedo that’s held together by safety pins.

Another major bug: The website works perfectly only on Google Chrome, because that’s the browser I use. It works partially on Firefox and hasn’t been tested on other browsers. I couldn’t figure out the real source of the problem but it might be another side-effect of metroui.css

Once you have designed a website, the fact that hits you is that you need content to keep going. And while coding/designing might be fun, gathering something to post is a different story altogether. Once I decided to add some articles, I also had to design an interface to present them beautifully and although I worked hard but wasn’t convinced with the end result. Maybe I didn’t exactly understand “Metro” as a design language. I wouldn’t blame myself though, Design Theory is a whole course in itself.

I’d hopefully be fixing these problems and a whole lot more in miniMe.

I’ve attached some screenshots of metroMe for those who want to have a look. The source code is all fugged up and I’d need time to make it worth uploading (which I don’t intend to) but in case you need it, you can contact me and I’ll see how I can help.