Both Sides Now

It's true: you are your own worst enemy. And your own worst client.

At vivid we've been working on the relaunch of our website for months now -- on and off, in the midst of other projects, office expansions, staff changes, and all the other unexpected occurrences that happen in a creative studio.

We've wanted to redo our site for a long time. When it launched in February 1995, it was cutting edge: a row of imagemapped icons against a transparent-background was pretty high tech back then. Seventeen months later it looked, frankly, quaint. Archaic. Tired.

And tired is something we couldn't afford to be. This is supposed to be our signature piece, our calling card, our best-of-show in an increasingly competitive arena.

Fair enough, we thought: we'll change the site. This is the Web, after all, where nothing stays the same for long. Besides, design and (re)creation is what we do every day for clients. Revamping our own website would be a simple matter, no?

Well, no. Truth is, revving our own site turned out to be one of the most challenging projects we've ever had.

Why is it so difficult to develop your own identity? A lot of reasons come to mind, but the biggest culprit seems to be self-image. We know who we are and what we're capable of -- but how can we effectively convey that to you without coming across like a bunch of raving egotists (or worse yet, desperate raving egotists)? How can we give you the essential information and paint a fair picture of ourselves?

We tried to approach this task the way we would any other. Treating the project like a "real" project -- complete with requirements documents, client review sessions, functional specs, and code freeze -- was a great idea, but sometimes difficult to practice. It's so tempting to take time away from an in-house project and devote it to others (read: paying clients). Nailing down the goals of the site and defining the target audience alone took many hours of sometimes-heated debate. And deciding how to reorganize existing content (as well as figure out what new information to add) was the source of many a lively exchange.

The types of problems we encountered were often different from the ones we typically run into with clients. Rather than needing to educate the client about the tools and medium, we had to reign ourselves in from going overboard with techno trickery and jargon. Be thankful you're not looking at a dynamically generated VRML front-end to a SQL-backed avatar-based chat engine (with Javascript tracking and Internet telephony!) right now.

Of course, not every situation yielded a 180 degree difference. We had the usual bout of late nights and schedule adjustments, filled out the same I/O specs and forms, consumed just as much pizza and beer, and spent just as many hours in meetings as we do on any other project of this size.

It's just that everyone had their own ideas about the site: some wanted to showcase our technology, others our strength in information design, and still others our project management and QA testing capabilities. Some of us wanted a site rich in sumptuous graphics; others preferred a flexible design that would serve high- and low-bandwidth users equally well. The text had to reflect the 40-odd personalities of the staff, yet speak with a singular voice (falling somewhere between "professional" and "pillow talk").

It's different when you're personally vested in the project. We had some hard decisions to make.

But we made them, and the end result is staring back at you from your monitor. In retrospect, we did a pretty great job. We're all really happy with the new site and, perhaps more importantly, we're all still friends. Applying the same methodologies we've used on other projects to this one was the right thing to do, especially in scheduling (it's much easier to produce good work when you're not under the gun).

"I've looked at the site from both sides now...."

Enjoy the fruits of our labor (please, tell us what you think). In the meantime, we're all going to throw a little party then take a nice long rest, write up our notes for the post-mortem, and hope that we can carry these lessons with us to the next revision.

 

Written by Drue Miller, Webmistress (July 31, 1996)

vivid opinions are written by individual vividians, but it's a pretty safe bet that the author is speaking on behalf of the entire staff. (Unless of course they're raving like a lunatic, in which case the rest of us will pretend we don't know them.) This page changes frequently -- please come back again to learn what's on our minds.

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