via A List Apart:Like the rest of your website, your About page is a robot. You load it up with information, give it directives, and send it out to represent you in the world. Although forums, blogs, and other two-way forms of online communication help bring humans back into the equation, you’re pretty much stuck with the robot model for relatively static essentials like the About page—but you do get to decide what kind of robot you want to use.
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Overheard in New YorkGeek #1: Let's just eat at Applebee's.
Geek #2: Dude, that's like the most expensive Applebee's in the universe.
Geek #1: Not "like". Literally, it is the most expensive Applebee's in the universe.
Geek #2: Ah, not so. In a constantly expanding universe, the probability approaches 100% that somewhere out there exists a more expensive Applebee's.
Geek #1: ...Let's just eat at KFC.
--Times Square
I've been doing lots of different things in the last year, and the work I am doing now was not anything I'd thought I'd be doing. The company I work for started a full website and infrastructure rebuild back in February, with me as the main HTML and CSS guru/writer.
We (at a very late date) hired an Information Architect, who began cranking out (read: I had to beg for them) wireframes to apply to our content. Now, as I understood it, he knew he had to speak to people within the company to learn what we do, what our content is, how it is currently modeled, and what we'd like to do with it on the new site.
Wow. Was I ever wrong.
We got enough ideas of page design to get us ready for our big announcement: to tell our paying clients that we were rebuilding the website to make their jobs easier by giving them better access to our content. That is, we thought it was better, until we put those pages in front of the clients at our big mid-year event. Oops. Let's try that one again.
This brings me to my current job. We fired the consultant. He had trouble working with a couple of the key people on the project, and just didn't seem to want to learn our whole structure and content model, or to take chances on changing them.
My co-worker C and I were asked if we could start working on the wireframing and content model. A good decision, since he and I maintain the old one every day we are there. A bad decision though, because we still had to maintain it while we started the new job of rebuilding it and wireframing it. Yeah, he and I are tired at this point.
We've been learning how difficult it can be to remodel content and a user's experiences with a site, especially when we don't have any real contact with the users. Add to that the internal agendas and politics, and you have one heck of a volatile experience. But an extremely educational one. We've since learned that we love doing this work, we make a great team, and what our strengths and weaknesses are. Theories have been born; hypotheses have been destroyed; ideas have been loved; ideas have been shot down.
We've been told how valuable our work is, but have not been given any extra compensation for it - that may be something that is taken care of once the project has been completed (not that it will ever be 100% done).
I don't know what will happen come January, since we launch the new site in December 2006. It will be an interesting time, and yet another educational experience. People will leave the team permanently, others will be deciding if the company is where they want to stay, and others on the team will not know of any other place to go.
I, for one, will be giving my future there a very close look, and who knows - I may find a hidden treasure.
