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This site began a little bit differently than the recommendations I offer here, which might explain some of
the difficulties I ran into later.
I did not really begin with "The Why," I began with the prospectus. This is in part a
function of educational process, and can't really be helped, but the mistake made, I think, was assuming that
the prospectus was "The Why."
Because it wasn't. It was really just a synthesis of relevant information, suppositions, and literature that I
had culled over my years of coursework that was attached to a proposal that I make a website to somehow deal
with the information.
This was not a horrible way to begin, however. A lot of critical thinking had been done - the bulk of the
information to be presented was there, and a lot of the information design was
already taken care of. However, such a detailed analysis as the prospectus offered an illusion of more
preparation than had actually taken place.
An assumption was made that since the myriad parties that are usually included in the pre-production portion of
a site construction were confined to a single individual, any additional planning could be done "on-the-fly."
This was an error. The time that might have been saved by "integrating" pre-planning with actual production was
quickly lost as design was started, scrapped, and restarted several times.
As a result, the end product took a lot longer than it should have to produce, and is remarkably different than
how I had initially imagined it. Following are some of the points of "failure" that resulted from my not
following my own advice satisfactorily:
- The interface was built without a coherent interaction (or information) design as its foundation, and as a result,
time had to be spent tweaking it throughout the process, making the final UI much less cohesive than it should have been.
- The entire HTML construction process and testing was done in a single browser (Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 2000),
on a single operating system, which leads to some unfortunate visual consistencies for visitors with alternate
configurations.
- The application of collected user tracking data was never fleshed out, and as a result, does not exist in any kind
of truly functional form.
- The entire site, though information-intensive by design, is far too text heavy. Information graphics and more
visual examples should have been threaded throughout for more efficient communication.
There are others, but those are the ones that bother me on a regular basis. The short of it is, I simply ran out of
time. Time is a resource that will always be limited, in any project.
That is a crucial point that is never really brought up on this site, perhaps to its own detriment.
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