My Graphic/Web Design History » Web 1.5

Discovering Montana (2000)

John — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:42:43 +0000

I worked solo with ITSD on this project to redesign the State of Montana’s homepage. I started with a rough mockup that they commissioned from an advertising agency in Billings and took it from there. I managed the entire project from inception to delivery. It was implemented in Adobe GoLive at the request of the client, as that was the tool they wanted to use to maintain it after delivery.

The biggest challenge, as it was with most sites of the time, was cross-browser consistency and display. The war between Netscape and Internet Explorer was raging and neither of them fully supported cascading stylesheet standards (though the latter was especially bad). Another consideration was accessibility as the state has to cater to all of its citizens. At the time, and after many discussions, the client and I decided to create a template system that utilized a text-only layout for those who needed it, and a fully-styled version. Both used the same content files so that updating the site would not be a nightmare of version control. I thought it fairly ingenious for static HTML (with server-side includes) and no formal content management system. Through later usability testing by the University of Montana it was discovered that this was not in fact the best way to serve disabled users.

A design feature of the site was the ability to easily update the masthead at the top of the page and the semi-circular image on the left. Not only could the site be “freshened” this way, the templates could also be reused for other agency web sites, and it was. This design was reused, and these are just the clones I created, for the following:

Department of Revenue
Department of Corrections (templates only)
Information Technology Services Division (templates only)
Risk Management and Tort Defense Division
Commissioner of Political Practices
State Tax Appeal Board
Montana Consensus Council
Montana Historical Society, Encountering Montana: Lewis and Clark in Montana (design change)
Legislative Services Division (design change)

After the launch of the original Discovering Montana site, and at the urging of the client, I was given a Special Award (12/6/2000) for my efforts by TRW for the project.

Then, after another company came in to do some other systems work for the state, they started calling themselves “Discovering Montana” and claimed all my work as their own.

Years later the design/templates were eventually discarded completely and redesigned in-house by ITSD. All web design for the state was brought in-house by 2003 and I had to go a different direction with my career at Northrop Grumman.

Risk Management and Tort Defense Division (2002?)

John — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:55:39 +0000

This is the second incarnation of the RMTD web site. The first version I designed and developed in 1999 was completely old school, with tables for layout and font tags. After Discovering Montana launched in 2000 and several agency web sites were assimilated to the new design, the RMTD director grudgingly had us assimilate his site. A year or two later they brought me back in to further refined and “tightened up” the design. I believe this is the first of the many Discovering Montana clones I’ve uploaded. Only the “back-end” or infrastructure/templates of Discovering Montana was cloned for Legislative Services.

Note: I’ll have to verify the date this was launched.

Legislative Services (2002)

John — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:38:18 +0000

This site was built on the same basic architecture as Discovering Montana. That is, a basic template system using server-side includes (SSI) with separate text-only versions of every page, archaic browser sniffing and very rudimentary Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The client had wireframes ready to go and the design basically “figured out” before I held the kick off meeting.

The larger task was managing the huge volume of content and getting it reformatted for use in the new templates. There was only so much we could do with tools like Dreamweaver and it’s utility for cleaning up code. Most of it had to be combed through by hand. While I did have help on the client side, the majority of it fell in my lap. Still, the outcome was successful and the client was happy. And that’s the bottom line.