↑ Summer 2000 front page design, as planned.

In 1999-2000, I led the design team for Williams Students Online, a college computer and media organization. The WSO website served as the major information source for a 3000-person campus.

An innovative team of developers was continually adding new features. The site had taken on the structural complexity of a major newspaper site, but the design was more appropriate for a personal homepage. The site badly needed a visual and structural reorganization.

↑ Modified version of the previous front page, fall 1999. This interim version retains the look-and-feel created by an earlier designer, but improves usability and maintainability. Later iterations moved farther away from this design.

WSO had a limited number of staff designers, and new parts of the site were coming on-line every month, requiring attention. Rather than scrap the existing design entirely, I chose to modify the site incrementally, starting with the new parts of the site. I created a broad specification for type and layout, so that the designers could easily integrate their section into the site as a whole. I reorganized the site’s logical structure, creating a wide hierarchy with many attachment points for new features and tools.

↑ Part of a site organization diagram.

Over time, the design team revised all of the site’s sections, bringing pages in line with the new standards. We had updated the front page piece-by-piece, saving it for last. At the time of my graduation, the only remaining change to the site was the posting of the final front page, seen at the top of this site.