What I found interesting about the site, now that I am no longer it’s loving parent, is the strengths of those who are now the primary caretakers of it, and how strongly they are reflected in so many parts of the site. I was the primary caretaker since its birth (if you will?) to a few months ago. During my time, I spent only a few hours trying to clean up the look. One night, I tried to take it away from the offensive 1990’s, “we can code, but haven’t even attempted to comprehend interface design”, to a more natural and consistent website. You can see from the following template that we started with, the little changes I made, yet the large difference it makes in the whole experience.
I actually didn’t get to make a ton of visual changes overall. 90% of my work was back-end and this is why I quit. It was a great job, the people I worked with were fantastic and I even enjoyed teaching myself the archaic VBScript it was originally designed in (no longer, thank goodness), but I was never really told to take it from a great 1995 website to one that actually belonged in this, the twenty first century. I simply did little tweaks, here and there when I found the time; which was not very often.
This last shot shows some new code I was not involved in creating. It's interesting how the design has now started to become cluttered. It’s obvious, that for a truly great experience, one should have both designer and programmer, relatively separated, to achieve a great site. Both parties can know a little bit about both design and programming, but that really great idea of a man, who can program himself out of the infinite loop, while simultaneously filing the crowd through the process, with Apple-like, anthropomorphic sterility, is basically fiction.
