Friday, May 28, 2004

CCMS Web Site

Done. Done. Done! I had pretty much finished all of the stuff I wanted to do with the design weeks ago. I've mostly been waiting on the content from Communications. Well, chock up another item to a last minute deadline. CCMS was being highlighted at a conference and they wanted to site redesign published prior to that date. A few items had to be knocked off the menus, but otherwise the site is finally complete.

There were a few pages I was working on myself regarding the functionality of the site. Those were fairly minor, though, and I was able to hammer them out when the site was going live. I still need to work on the site search (now that I think about it). Though I don't think it's a high priority it's still something we need to do (especially if we'll be moving more of our sites to open-source platforms). I've been distracted by the AAAS redesign, so hopefully I can get on that particular item next week.

After getting everything worked out and spending some time editing the site rather than designing it I think I'd like to make some changes to some of the navigation. The image-based navigation is too much trouble to maintain since we're not using any round-trip method of editing such as Dreamweaver/Fireworks or GoLive/ImageReady. When I get a chance I think I'll investigate using only text for the navigation again. I gave up that idea after having to deal with the designer, but now that we've completed the initial development I should be able to make that kind of change to the site and support that kind of change with consideration of the time required to make navigational modificiation.

Plus now that the designer is done with the project I won't have to bend to the wishes of someone who has no idea about the limitations of HTML.