So, let’s say you’re working on a project. It’s filled with your blood, sweat, and tears. You’ve been working on it through nights, barely sleeping at night, drinking large amounts of coffee during the day to stay up. Putting all into it. But then everything goes wrong.

Well, we’ve all been there, many times. If you’re a web-developer, it’s a natural part of your life. It’s a natural part of mine too. Let me tell you my story.

What happened?

Well, recently, I was working on two project. The first was a bust, the second was scrapped. The first was Only A Quote and the second was an independent blogging system.

How was Only A Quote a bust? Well, it was not ENTIRELY a bust. It receives good traffic, there’s great Ad Sense yields. The design is wonderful and the PHP is amazing It gets good ratings Google-wise but it’s nothing to be REALLY excited over. It was an important project to me because I spent COUNTLESS hours perfecting the script, learning PHP, CSS, and HTML. Basically, I spent my holiday break sweating over this project. I expected to sell the website for close to a thousand dollars but after a month of auctioning, it all ended with a hundred dollar bid.

Terrible.

The next project was a blogging system for a customer. I created a custom design, interface. Really intuitive too! Let’s just say, it was a jewel to me. It wasn’t perfect, but let’s just say I spent A TON of time figuring it out. There were no directions as to what the project should look like but that’s okay. I made an administration secure from any threats. Well, the whole deal. Imagine a simple wordpress-like blogging system. But, the client didn’t like it so I scrapped it and created a wordpress theme instead.

There is one more “failure”. Well, this one was not so bad because I was never counting on it in the first place, but it was damn annoying that nothing came out of it.

My “Age Tester”. My first PHP application. Well, the problem was that I had no way to advertise it well, I had no good domain name. And let’s just say, I suck at designing stuff like this haha. It’s still fun or whatever, and I send a link to my friends once in a while when they ask me if their partner is too old or too young for them. But that’s it.

How to deal with it?

It’s always hard to deal with failure, especially when you’re failing and you think it’s entirely unfair. I can admit that the only project -I- relied on was OnlyAQuote but I’m sure you have had your own experiences where you had to rely on multiple projects that went bust.

So, there is no easy way to say this other than, Just SCAVENGE the project. Strip it clean! It sounds silly, but think of every website you work on as a beautiful creation full of priceless parts. When that beautiful creation becomes a horrendous ugly thing, take it apart.

Let me use my Bodyshop project as an example:

The website has 57 files and 18 folders. Most of which is code and pictures. Well, all of it. There must be something worth it in there.

First of all, I took apart the whole admin area of the site and salvaged the scripts for my own script library. I have an authentication script there, add to database scripts, blogging scripts, well, a bunch of stuff. I even have an upload form (and those come in handy) as well as a mailing script. All of this work, better not go to waste. I can use ALL of these for my next projects.

Streamlined, secure authentication takes time to create, and here I have it, already done. I have a login form as well, so that’s done. Admin scripts and the blog script are the most important parts to me but there is more.

I can also use some of the images for the future. I created my own texture (as seen in the snapshot way above) that I can use for other project (involving metal and such). I also have a pretty decent car cut-out silhouette which I won’t have to work on next time I do something involving cars.Oh, and I have a pretty button to use

I couldn’t do the same for Only A Quote since I was selling the script, but I did bookmark all the scripts that were used from other programmers. (ie. web redirection)

All this takes is a bit of time, and tears that come along with stripping your project of its meat.

Did you learn something?

Making mistakes, and failure, it’s a process of learning! Did you learn something while making this project? I’m sure you have!

Now go write about it!

I’ve gotten some good traffic from the posts I based on the scripts I’ve written. Just check out this list:

• Blogging system part 1
• Blogging system part 2
• Mobile Site tips
• Shortlink API

So, you’ve a lot of material you can write about. Plus, It’s rather nice if you share your secrets! Haha, I know I did. Some of this stuff took me a while to figure out, but, I got it down and now you can reap from my benefits, too.

Also, it sent a lot of traffic my way when I submitted these tutorials online. Double win!

Conclusion

Failures will teach you important lessons and can be salvagable, perhaps not to the original intent of goal, but good enough. Just, learn from your mistakes, okay? I know I did, and I’m sure you will too, over and over and over and over…again.