One of my current roles / projects for the Church is to manage the production of their desired web presences. I know that doesn’t really flow as a sentence but stick with me.

As I stated in my “What Do I Support” post I am in charge of the project management and development of the four websites the Church wants to run. Each site will have a unique aim and there is no real way to easily integrate the four either politically or aesthetically.

The site that is due for launch in the very near future is our eCommerce site. One of the roles our Church has developed is that of an importer of Christian books and in some cases exclusively for certain publishers. These are then re-sold through three avenues. Direct to our Church, direct to the public (though how they find out is a miracle at present) and through the high street and myriad of smaller Christian bookshops within Churches up and down the UK with the vast majority of the business being trade sales.

The developer (for I am but a basic html and css user) of the site and I physically met back in mid February and we have been in regular contact since. It’s taken until approx 3 weeks ago for him to produce a sign off sheet for the various features we’d agreed on back in February. This is not to totally blame him as inbetween time we’ve been reseraching ourselves as to what we want, what we would like the look and feel to be like, etc.

Since the sign off of the features though it would appear that he’s been trying to find every reason to prevaricate and not get the site built and I’m in a quandry as to my way forward. Last night I spoke with him and as ever he’s friendly but I got nothing but a stream of excuses and how busy he is, etc.

If it wasn’t for the the fact that we’d like to launch the site in 4 to 5 weeks time then I’d be off trying to find another developer. The thing is, he’s a very good developer and I’ve known him for years but I sort of suspected he was struggling back in March and said we would re-discuss it all at the end of April and if he wanted to walk away then he could. At that point I felt two months plus a bit of extra cash to a new developer would still be plenty of time – especially as the research, debate and agreement side of the work had been done.

This much I do know … I certainly won’t be using him to develop the remaining three sites even though they will be far simpler.

For those of you like me who need the talents of others to do stuff how do you handle their seeming reluctance to get the job done, even when it’s long been agreed and a deadline set? I don’t think in my Christian walk I’ve ever had to deal with this type of situation.

I’ll admit, I’m seriously struggling with it all.