No, unfortunately this is not in relation to the IA job (though I did of course try) but about the lovely website they made us (LSBU) and launched (after what must have been about a years fighting for content) last week!One good thing about my job is that I do have the opportunity to influence on the people who do additional website work for us and after having seen, cringed and shaken my head in disappointment at certain client work I though it was about time that I use this influence to the max and actually push through my client suggestions for our estates developments project.
Now I am not about to say that this was the greatest run project ever (it started almost a year ago) but thankfully all problems were more due to the fact that firstly the people who wanted the website hadn’t really thought why and then after sorting that out didn’t cough up any content to actually put in it (this essentially ended up in a stalemate not even I could do anything about and was only concluded after the project was handed over to our marketing department). But the results are clearly excellent, the IA just works, the design and is clean and the additional features are just subtle and nice; I know people always say that you should never meet or work with your heroes but thankfully everything turned out great (finally) and I am hoping that we can do more work on the LSBU website with them in the future (I do think we are in line for a redesign ;>)
From my experience there are still a large number of companies that still don’t quite get the whole web standards approach and where they learn some of their stuff I really do not know but to finally work with someone who actually doesn’t need to be asked especially to create a site in such way is really a breath of fresh air. In essence they have produced the kind of website I would have made (but better) and one that I can gain inspiration and tips from when I get bogged down producing stuff in the future.
So big thanks go out to the clear:left boys! The site they made can be found at www.lsbu.ac.uk/estatesdevelopments and if you want to hear even more glowing praise of them from me you can read the quote I provided for them and they are now using on their about us page - my name on an external website - the world domination plan is starting!
Tags clearleft, LSBU, websites, web standards
3 Comments
September 17th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Ooops - it’s not estatesmdevlopments, it’s estatesdevelopments (feel free to get rid of this bit of comment!)
Aren’t all the cool kids calling them “realignments” nowadays?
I’m liking the look of the estates pages a lot - very clean, with the information right where you want it. Oh, and nice quote on the clear:left about page - truly the world domination is beginning.
September 18th, 2006 at 12:19 am
god damn my crap spelling! I have no idea what the cool kids call anything - i was never allowed to hang around with them (and secretly always liked being individual)
September 22nd, 2006 at 3:17 pm
The Clear:Left boys certainly did a fine job - very nice it is too. Always good to have summat to aspire to!
Thanks also for your link to your google maps footling; liked your go, will have to pick your brains more about passing the Lat and Lang parameters to the script for different markers.
Have just signed up for upcoming.org, so will probably see ya at the next WSG meet. TTFN,
Caz