I had the opportunity yesterday to speak with my mom's boss (who happens to be the senior pastor of a local church) about helping them update and maintain their website. The current site is being hosted by some girl who designed it before, and they can't update it themselves. I showed them what I had done with ASP and PHP to provide easy update forms, and the senior pastor and youth pastor thought it was great.

Then the youth pastor started going on and on about how cool Flash sites were. He brought up some suck-ass flash site that had mystery meat navigation (I kid you not - the home page was four rotating cubes, and tooltips just said "click here to open"), and both pastors were thrilled with it. I explained to them why that was a very, very bad idea.

THEN the SP bring up how he wants this website to draw in new church-goers, rather than provide information to current members of the church (e.g. member directory, downloadable sermon notes/recorded sermons, etc). He basically said that if the website isn't really "sharp" and snazzy, people will think the church sucks and not even bother coming.

I find out they want to host the site at the church, on some old PIII server running Windows Server 2000, using a mid-level DSL connection. I explain the bandwidth issues, the power outage issues, the fact that SBC's DSL was down in the entire state of Indiana for 24 hours this week, etc.

And yet they don't listen to me. I bypassed working on a final that was due that same day to spend half an hour talking to a couple of douchebags who basically refused to listen to anything I had to say, even though I was more knowledgable about dynamic website design than the two of them combined.

Needless to say, I won't be working with them. It's not worth the stress and idiocy.