Renewal, and Like That.

I am back into it, again, after a little vacation, and hitting the ground running these last couple of weeks, doing much that is New&Improved.

Foremost is probably the work being done on the new Templates. The UNL Web Developers' Network has been at work on a new page since last fall. Seth, Roger, Eric, Vishal, Aaron, Brett, Bob and a host of others have been hammering out details concerning navigation, color and content, but the most important thing anyone has done so far has been in service to answering the question Why?.

Why redesign our pages? Why now? Why did we place navigation here, here and there instead of putting it all here? Why would someone point at this and click instead of pointing at that and clicking? Why isn't this or that area of the page getting more traffic or interest? On and on and on, one of the most refreshing things about this redesign has been the willingness of all of the various participants to challenge one another by asking that simple question. Why?

Why, indeed. And the best part of the exercise for me has been watching it all unfold. These are very creative people, and most of them are very adept at the technical workings of not just a Web browser as we are familiar with them on desktop and laptop computers, but also with the new cell phones and other Internet Appliances appearing with some regularity. The dozen or so neurons responsible for creativity must live very close in our brains to the ones responsible for the concept of ownership, or family, because in my experience it is very difficult to challenge someone's work, someone's concept, someone's vision, without them taking it a little personally. And yet there has been almost none of that, in this entire process.

Back me up against a wall and make me defend my position and I can tell you why I made the design choices that I made. But I have a hard time doing it without getting defensive, or moody if the collective decides to go another way. It has been an inspiration, watching this group of professionals working with only one goal, producing the best Web site we can for the community we serve, wrestling with the various choices involved in going about attaining that goal. We all want the same thing; we just sometimes all want the same thing differently. But we are all still friends. It has been amazing.

I am also about knee-deep in renewing the training that I do here. And again, the question of Why keeps me on track. Why did I introduce this concept here, instead of doing it later? Why would we need to continue discussing this, when that trend kind of burned itself out about 2002? Why mention workarounds for Web browsers that have miniscule representation in our user logs these days?

So I have been going through each course, page-by-page, and making various edits and cuts and embellishments. We have new software in the Creative Suite 4 release from Adobe. That means new Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and we are deploying these on the also-new laptops in the training theater this week, so it is time that our training materials reflected the various changes in moving from CS3 to CS4, as well as all we have come to learn in the years since the original pages were set down. Again and again, I have asked myself Why and I think the new courses are going to be much better for it.

Why has led me to change the way I work quite a bit, too. I am going to cut down on the number of computers I work on, which should mean that more often than not I have the latest files with me at any given time. And I'm near finishing about a skillion different time-sinks that should mean I have time to work on some training I have had to put off for weeks.

I hope you have a good summer, too.