New site for my favorite client
Just updated the look of Mum’s campaign website: Barb Hobson | A Strong Persistent Voice for Coquitlam-Maillardville. I changed everything without altering one line of HTML, man do I love CSS (IE6, I still hate you).
Posts Tagged “accomplishment”
Bookstore wins a hubbie
Almost a year ago now the BCIT Bookstore let Web Services know that the e-commerce application they used to manage their online sales was upgrading and asked if we’d like to help skin the new site. The department was pretty busy at the time and my Manager said we didn’t have time to help out but put them in contact with me so I could direct them to the style guide and technical guidelines.
I had a look at the application and decided we could do better than that so I asked my Manager if I could do some follow up and he said it was okay as long as it didn’t interfear with my other work.
I met with the Bookstore intending only to talk about the web app but ended up talking about their static store front just as much. Because of the way their inventory and software work they have not one but three online stores and they have trouble communicating the difference to their customers. They also felt like some of their most important information, like their return policy, was buried.
Skinning the e-commerce sites was relatively easy. The new version of the application was set up logically with good CSS tags and lots of includes. Not only that, the default layout was very easy to transform into the existing template I wanted to mimic.
I started off with this:
And created this:
For the static store front I made some changes to the left navigation based on the most desired pages, created three clear calls to action, placed the catch all action at the bottom of the list instead of the top of the list of options, and separated the two unrelated messages contained in the single page block on the right.
I worked off the side of my desk for a few months on it, meeting with the bookstore a few times, and when I was done they were happy enough with the results to email my manager and thank me in the Campus Update newsletter!
My manger called me into his office to talk about it and I thought, “Uh-oh, what if he’s upset I spent so much time working on this?” But I worried unnecessarily since he proceeded to tell me how it was good interacting design :)
Campus Hub, the third party company who hosts the actual stores liked it so much they’ve been directing people who want to skin their stores to talk to me for advice, and to top it all off, they awarded the store with a “Hubbie” for usability.
We made the cut!
One of the videos we made the other day made the cut into the final Gmail behind the scenes video. Alistair’s fancy editing shows the three of us morphing between chin up bars with 1:37 left to go.
A second video of ours was chosen as a featured clip. If you got to the page with the final Gmail behind the scenes video and scroll down to the map, our multi monitor video appears if you click the Vancouver icon.
@media: Day Two
Today I got two free books, Jeremy signed Bullet Proof Ajax for me and I snagged an extra Microformats cheat sheet for Brandon. All in all a success.
CADE/AMTECH Conference
I was in Winnipeg speaking at the CADE/AMTECH Conference last week. The weather was beautiful and I saw an excellent hockey game in which the Manitoba Moose (the Vancouver Canucks’ farm team) played spectacularly only to to be knocked out of the AHL playoffs in a very Canucks way (up 2-0 at the end of the first, lost 2-3 in OT).
As part of the Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) initiative at BCIT Danny Catt, one of the faculty, was sponsored to take a trip around South America and Antarctica studying local research and responses to sustainability and environmental issues. Throughout the journey he used blogging, digital photography, virtual lecture software, shared file storage space, and of course e-mail to keep in touch which his students and communicate with the world.
Terry Fuller, the instructional development coordinator that was helping Danny with the project submitted a paper to CADE to talk about “Using the Internet to make Meaningful Global Connections in the Classroom.” I was involved in creating the web page and blog that was the highlight of the project and Terry asked me to talk about the “technical” side of designing the website.
Rather than boring the crowd with PHP, HTML, CSS, CMS and other TLAs. I talked about the rest of the stuff that goes into the design process: user needs, site objectives, functional specifications, content requirements, information architecture, navigation design, visual design, and all that good stuff but for those of you who care the site was driven by Drupal and included a XML driven flash photo gallery, a Google map mashup, and some video and audio recordings, though not as many as we’d hoped – apparently it’s tough to upload media files from the middle of the Amazon – who knew?
The project was a lot of fun and very different my usual daily duties. I’ll post a summary and the slides soon.
“What a great way to start a Monday.”
Part of my job at BCIT is providing technical support to our content publishing community. These are the people who provide the text to fill the templates we make and keep that text up to date. Most of them aren’t web developers and are a little intimidated by the idea of working on the website.
Forty percent of our job is providing encouragement. “Don’t worry, it won’t go up on the website until we release it so you can play around all you want.” “We can always undo the changes if you think you’ve made a mistake.” I get my best compliments from these kinds of support calls.
This morning on of our clients told me, “You’ve made me feel so much better about all this now, I’m so glad you called. What a great way to start a Monday.”
What a great way to start a Monday :)
Striving for excellence
I just finished my first micoformatted page! When I was writing the information page for HOPE’s spring dinners I coded all the dinners as events and the organizers as hcards :) I did work with Brandon to re-do the BCIT Contacts application to use microformats but he did most of the coding on that project. This is the first time I’ve done it myself.
I didn’t actually tell anyone at HOPE that I’d done it that way since it doesn’t effect the way the page looks and I figure they’ll discover it for themselves if it’s useful to them. However, my friend thinks I should tell them so they recognize just how good a job I’m doing for them.
I don’t really feel like I did anything other than my job. Isn’t it my job to do a good job?
In the last two weeks of February, CBC’s IDEAS aired a couple programs on the ideas of Richard Sennett, a sociologist and author who has studied the organization of work. Among other things he suggests the Western world is obsessed not with the idea of craftsmanship but with productivity. In other words: it doesn’t matter how well you do you job – just how quickly.
The speaker at my graduation ceremony spoke at length encouraging us to “strive for excellence
” in everything we do. Not just in the work we do but also in our interactions as part of our daily lives. From answering a client’s e-mail to cooking dinner, he urged us to do our best.
Is doing a good job something society has to be told to do now?
I’m presenting at a conference!
One of the projects I’ve worked on at BCIT is Catt-Trax2. The website is for Danny Catt who is traveling through South America and Antarctica exploring conservation and sustainability issues and talking to the people in those regions working with those issues daily. He’s taking photos, video, and sound clips of this journey and blogging about his experiences. I helped architect the website and did some design and implementation work on it. We have fun stuff like a Google Maps mashup showing his route too.
The project manager for the project is an Instructional Development Coordinator named Terry Fuller who has done an excellent job pushing the team to give their most while restraining Danny’s overwhelming enthusiasm to keep the project in scope.
She’s asked me to co-present about the project at a conference for distance educators that is happening in Winnipeg in May. I’ve applied for funding to go with her. Our names are already on the website, so I hope I get the funding :)
