It's Over; It Begins Anew…

Or at least it has finally begun. The big Template move of 2009 is underway and pages all over the site are being renewed and reinvigorated with the New And Improved Template.

It might be worthwhile to take a moment here and actually go over what this represents. The work of Monday morning actually started about a year ago, with a regular meeting of the UNL Web Developers Network. We started thinking back then about what the new pages might end up looking like, and considering what features we wanted to have added or removed or improved and so on.

The key thing in all of this, I think, was that we had plenty of time, and we approached the whole project as a series of manageable tasks.

Tom Clancy was once asked how anyone could possibly sit down and write a novel? He allowed as how it was definitely a daunting task, and wondered himself how anyone could do it. What he did, he said, was to approach the whole book as a series of steps. Write a first sentence. Get it all shined-up and then move on to the next one. Stand up. Walk around. Get used to the idea of how these two sentences work and play together, and then add a third. At some point, you have an opening paragraph. Then, you have some idea, some guidance, as to what your next paragraph has to be, so start in on it. Two or three paragraphs and you have yourself a page. String a few pages together and you have built a serviceable chapter. Lather, rinse, repeat; and the chapters become… a book!

We did not sit down around a big table one day and decide the navigation was supposed to sit atop the page. We actually spent one a couple of days coming together with upward of a dozen navigation schemes. Some were from higher education sites. Others were from online shopping sites. Others were news outlets, government sites and more. We didn’t care where the Next Big Idea came from, we just cared about the idea. Once we settled on a top-nav situation, work began on how to make that all work, and—and this is important—how to make it all work within our current situation, with the relatedlinks and navigation and footer information we already have living in the sharedcode folder. Our navigation, remember, was (is) built from two levels of nested unordered lists. So whatever we did, it had to work with anyone’s current biplane navigation file.

We talked about color. We talked about shapes. We talked about White Space. We talked about what language to use, in marking up the pages. Remember, we were working on a design that would probably welcome the incoming class of 2017 or so. We tried to shoot current trends out into the future and make a page for the technology of summer, 2009 and the technology and the marketplace of 2012 as well. At the time, we considered HTML 5 and XHTML 2 briefly and discarded both. And that was good, because the XHTML working group imploded a short time later. We are holding with XHTML 1 for the time being, and will reexamine the situation for the next redesign.

We got a lot of input from a lot of people. Not every idea was incorporated into the site—some ideas actually conflicted with one another and we couldn’t do both. Not everyone is entirely happy with every aspect of the page today, but the general feeling I get from the feedback I have received has so far been very positive. I am interested in hearing from people today, of course, but also in hearing how people think about the pages in a year or so. Having lived with them for a year, I suspect people’s opinions may change some.

Time is your buddy in a project like this one. The more you have, the better job you can do. The big stuff comes together quickly, or can. But I always wish I had more time to shine up the little details in a project like this one. I am hoping that we will have more time for the next one.

I am already looking forward to it.