Fine Time... posted August 07, 2007
For a redesign...
No, not this site (not yet, anyway), but that of the School District of Haverford Township (current "old" version). Here is a sneak peak at the redesigned home page, which is currently undergoing testing before being officially launched.
The redesign is a culmination of about 10 months of thought and 3 days of work. I have literally been thinking of redesigning it since it came out last August. The issues ran from coding errors to usability issues to a fundamental flaw in how the site was designed and how the site was being administered. The new site corrects every single issue with semantic, valid, and accessible markup.
While I would like to get into the details of how all these issues developed, I will save that for another post. For now, all anyone needs to know is that this is how the site was meant to be, even if it took a whole year to get there. I'm excited to see it breath the light of day.
Comments
Posted by: Jane Greenspun | August 23, 2007 05:46 AM
What was the fundamental flaw in how the site was designed and how the site was administered?
Posted by: Jason Luther | August 24, 2007 12:48 PM
I'm saving the long version of this for another post, but basically I'm talking about how the site was set up. It's not a critique of how the site has been used or the staff of the district (if that is how you were interpreting "administered".
I'm talking about how the site didn't fit with how it was being used. The original premise was that the site would be updated by multiple authors: teachers, department heads, human resources, the communications office, to name a few. And the content area for the home page was limited to the center column of the old design. After the site was launched, it became one author and additional content on the sidebars.
Basically, the site was ill-fitted for how it was being used by those who administered it.
I'll explain more in another post soon.