In many cases -- not all, as evidenced by the ridiculous amount of money Jennifer Crusie is getting for her cooperative books -- writing with someone else is the pits. What started as your idea (or theirs!) becomes a shared venture that may be as awesome as sliced bread or as much of a headache as stale bread. When you write by yourself, you make your own characters, your own outlines, your own plot. The story goes where you want it (barring talk of schizophrenic characters in one's head, of course, with their own bloody ideas of where they're going and why!) and you're only answerable to the great and powerful gods of Logic and Creativity.
Writing with someone else is sharing. It's taking what someone else has already done and adding to it, taking away from it, or knowing that what you're doing is going to be further edited, changed, mangled, or picked over until it resembles something else entirely. Maybe something better? Maybe not. Not exactly yours anymore.
Making websites in a studio is a lot like the last bit. In the end, the product is better for the sharing, but the road to get there can be very messy.
My last week has been spent working with the markup that our Evil Overlord -- He Who Shall Not Sit Among Us in the Plebian Downstairs Death Star Desk Arrangement (what? He Who Shall Not Be Named was taken by a guy with no nose...) -- had already worked up for our internal project management system. A solid week. I'm not done yet, either. The reason it's taken me so long, of course, is that I'm the second author who's come along (third, if you coun't Heather's already drafted designs!) and picked up the pen of creativity to continue the ongoing saga of The Little Website That Could. And like any good author, I've had to go back and read the book from scratch to get a feel for what's already there. Book. Mark-up. Whatever!
It's always much easier to style the mark-up you've done yourself, and in this regard, I think individual web designers have the advantage. It takes a lot of time to familiarize yourself with code you had nothing to do with, and at least twice, I've had to go back and fix mistakes I'd made because I hadn't realized what was linking to where and what and how. (To use the same example I'd dredged up before, I had the characters head to New York, only to have the heroine's grandmother go out in a blaze of glory in Tombstone style shoot-out with the mob, only to find two hundred pages later that the heroine never had a grandmother and she was born in a test tube with four other clones--- I digress.)
And yet, while I'm not particular fond of Jennifer Crusie's collaborative efforts, I have to point out that her secondary author gives Crusie a little bit of a grounding effect, a chance to shake off the fluff that accompanies a lot of her latest work and make it that much more solid -- without losing the appeal. And I think that's where the strength in teams comes to play in web design. Having one or two people there to shape the project, then having the creative input and skillset of a team brings a website from conceptual fluff to solid, working, grounding tool. That is the advantage of teams, of collaborative efforts. The things Rusty missed, I have added. The things I'm doing wrong, Kyle catches. And so on. It's fabulous.
...Yes. This entire blog post was a great big pat on the vanity-back for my teammates and job. I freely admit it.
