Behold, I do a new thing!

I'm in the middle of redesigning our entire college website. Do you know what a MISSION that is???

The current site was designed by a guy who didn't know what the heck he was doing. I've spent most of the past 2 years just cleaning up his "spiderweb" structure into a "tree" structure, fixing links, making layout the same across pages, correcting his grammar etc. The site is by no means ideal at the moment, but it DOES contain the most up-to-date info on the college, and for the first time in history our entire yearbook is online, along with downloadable application forms. So I've made some progress. Unfortunately every now and then some nasy person sends me a nasty email telling me the website is crap. If they could only have seen the previous one...

By the end of this year, I want to have an entirely new, easy to navigate, info-rich site up and running. It ain't easy though. There's a culture of non-providing of requested information, of apathy when you ask for stuff. And then there are the old stick-in-the-muds who come up with the most interesting objections to having their course info online. Stuff I never even thought would be an issue.

Working through my Dreamweaver course, I'm trying to integrate a good-looking interactive site with the fact that we're living in the 3rd-world and many of our visitors may not be completely up-to-date on the technology needed to access the site. I'm hoping to use CSS for easy layout changes, but am still trying to get my brain around it, and how to use it with other design elements. It's a LOT of work just to get the site design right, never mind insert the info.

If I can pull this one off, it's going to be awesome! I only hope I CAN pull it off. The website was given to me to do "in my spare time" (what???), with no extra pay for taking it on. And from now until March my "usual" work (the stuff my job description says I'm here for) is going to be full-throttle running back and forth. Add to that my responsibility for updating and publishing all our info books / yearbook / promotional materials, and I'm starting to think I may need more hours in the day.

But I have to admit, I enjoy creating good stuff, things that look great and work well. And if everything goes according to plan, the website will be one of those good stuff things once I'm done with it.