yjsoon

Almost two and a half months ago, my little programming group took on the project of redesigning the website for my workplace, as well as designing some kind of content management system that would allow easy updating by staff and corporate communications. (The photo above will be used in the new header.)

The current system requires teachers to design their pages from the ground up using a proprietary web CMS, and since most teachers aren’t designers (nor are the corp comms people), we’ve ended up with an embarrassing mess of fonts, colours and invalid markup. I’ll spare you the link to the school website, but it’s easily googleable.

It’s been a long and frustrating process, and we’ve had to deal with some pretty ridiculous client requests (“could you make the front page search box search the entire Internet instead of just the school website?”), but the end is in sight, and at least I learned something tremendously valuable (apart from the rather cool mootools library) about not being both client and designer*.

I also learned that I actually enjoyed this long and frustrating process infinitely more than my actual work… so we’ll see about what happens when this year’s over and they try to transfer me to an imaginably even more boring line of work.

Speaking of web standards, I just noticed today that the new MOE website is actually XHTML-Strict compliant and actually looks very clean. I hope it sets a good example for the rest of our government’s online web-of-crap (even IDA uses table layouts).

*I nearly said server.