I think I should recount the birth of our website before I forget it.
We started on the evening of Holy Monday, where we met in the university library. As documented in the previous post, initially there were only Lilian and I. She had a series of beautiful sketches of what she had in mind. For example, the home page looked like this on paper (as you can see, the final result is pretty much identical):
Sketch of the homepage
At some point Sarah turned up. The rest of the evening was spent discussing how everything would work, making sure we understood each other. That was only the beginning!
We met again on Wednesday evening, this time in my office. By then I had already made some of the pages, which Lilian picked apart in all possible ways. It was a good few hours of work, during which we developed signs of hysteria and we consumed my stash of chocolate (rigorously fair-trade!). Sarah picked up some of the website lingo ("padding-bottom" was her definite favourite). I think I got home just before 2am.
On Holy Thursday we gathered again in my office for a long session. We started at about 10pm, and we were all very sleepy and working very quietly. Sarah remembered to bring some food: so we had carrot sticks with houmous, a cheese sausage and more chocolate. This is how we looked at 1.44am.
The three of us
As the night gave place to morning, our rhythm of work increased tremendously. We carried on until after 4am, by which time Lilian was still wide awake. I'm pretty sure that she went home and hoovered her flat.
On Good Friday afternoon we met again in between the afternoon and evening celebrations. This time we were back in the library. The main achievement was buying the domain name: seek-er.org was officially ours! All seemed to go very smoothly at first, but we soon discovered a problem that even our provider could not fix.
Holy Saturday: we had yet another session in my office in which we put the final touches to the website. By then it looked how we wanted, and we were very pleased. We feasted on some curry from the mosque: Lilian's eyes could not be diverted from the Sarah's chicken curry, but I think that she managed to stick to her resolution of not eating meat during Lent. Around 8.20pm we dropped everything and managed to get Sarah to the evening mass just before they turned the lights off!
The issue of the domain name was miraculously solved during the night. By then, we had already given up hope to see it live, but luckily we were proven wrong. We spent some time during Easter Sunday uploading the final website in haste to get the last minute changes finalised, so it was ready for the launch party!
These past few days we've been fiddling with the website, but it has been very small changes compared to the previous week. In particular, we wanted to address the feedback collected at the launch party, which we found very positive and helpful. I think we have addressed all points, so I hope it will look even more polished than before.
In the coming days we will put up more content: we have many things we'd like to discuss, so keep following us. Personally, I'm looking forward to a post on Simeon the Stylite, which I'm trying to convince Sarah to write about. If you have something to say, join in the discussion through the comments!