How often the simplest solution is the best one

Filed in archive Consultancy on March 9, 2007

I recently accepted a little job of replacing a small contact script on a customer's website by a large one, with some feature requests. The customer makes use of an existing platform which accepts the use of many plugins.

I initially went for a custom made form. So I went ahead and created a form in plain html and showed it to them to make sure all fields were up to satisfaction. When that was settled, I went ahead and created a script in php to make the form work. And then I thought about security and spam, which was on the feature request list. I tried a couple of solutions, but none of them seemed to work as should. This was going to cost me a lot of time, if I didn't take a break from programming and google'd some more. And I found a plugin for the platform used, which was easily adopted and had all security features the customer asked for.

What did I learn from that ?

• you often start looking way too far to see the right solution that sits in front of you


• while you would say time was lost, lessons were learned and the programing bit keeps you up to today's world


• customer satisfaction is not in what you can magically do, but in the solution you offer. It doesn't nee to be handmade by you.


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  A job well done. The customer was very satisfied.