By: Caulen Kress
March 30, 2009 07:17 AM

I have recently been engaged in the biggest decision of my life to this point - buying a house! After 6 months of searching, I found what appears to be the perfect house (for me). This past weekend, the house was inspected. I sat in on the inspection and got a first-hand look at all of the work that will need to be done (some immediate, some longer-term). While I know that it will be very difficult at times, I'm really looking forward to tearing out carpet, ripping out old plaster, insulating, and getting rid of drop ceilings (I'd really like to meet the person who originally thought, "These ceilings look great... I want them throughout the whole house!"). I now know where my free time will be placed, but I'm embracing it.

This had me thinking: diagnosing and repairing an old house is a lot like taking on an existing website and updating it to our standards (stay with me, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, etc.). First, I look at the existing website as it looks on a web browser to get a sense of how it all works together. Then, I take a much closer look at its structure and code. Just like an old furnace, code can have a lifespan. Today, we have ultra high efficiency furnaces as well as the relatively new PHP coding language. Both improve on older styles. So, I purge the site of unwanted code and replace it with a more efficient version. Instead of a labyrinthine site with so many unecessary pages, I can consolidate a whole site into a few pages of code - making it easier for the website user (and current/future web developers).

Everybody has their own method at getting a satisfying result, and we here at 400lb think we have a pretty darn good content management system. My methods for going about home repairs is a bit greener, but I'll be asking a lot of questions to anyone with a lick of experience in the matter! Thanks to my work in web development, I now have a pretty sound approach to diagnosing and repairing issues.