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An annotated list of web sites I've worked on
I have created, re-designed, and/or maintain several intranet, extranet, and Internet websites. Of course, the intranet and extranet sites are hidden behind firewalls, and I am unable to showcase them. Below are sites that are available on the Internet.
The basic thrust of my web design career has been oriented toward content
rich sites, putting a premium on usability and
accessibility:
enabling the user to quickly access
the information needed, without excessive download waits, and with a minimum of "clicks".
Issues of "accessibility" involve more than ensuring that a public
website is
useable by the blind and visually impaired -- users may have old computers
with older-version browsers, may have slow dial-up lines, or may be accessing
the site from a network that prohibits the use of cookies
and/or scripting.
Please note that if you are viewing this page from a graphical
browser, "clicking" the links below will open another window; however,
for most browsers, if you leave that new window open, any subsequent "clicks" will merely refresh the new window with the desired page.
Partners Health Online
(http://www.partners.org/healthonline
[courtesy of the Internet Archive])
Partners Health Online was a project of Partners' Clinical Systems Research & Development group. Developed under the direction of Rita Zielstorff, R.N., M.S., the site was intended to serve as the common basis for health care information for all Partners institutions that cared to take advantage of it. The team consisted of myself as "web geek," a Nurse information specialist, and a part-time copy editor.
I designed the architecture of the site using an Access (later MS SQLServer) database to contain the information, serving pages dynamically using Cold Fusion technology. Unavailable for display is the ColdFusion-driven forms based editing system I developed for adding new pages, topics, and categories,
and updating content text.
Since we hoped that the site would be used by different Partners institutions whose own web sites had their own "look and feel", I created separate Cascading Style Sheets and special
Cold Fusion templates that would change the appearance of the site,
with the change of a single parameter. So, for example, the
link from the website of Brigham & Women's Hospital looked a lot like the other BWH pages at the time, whereas the
link from Mass. General's website looked more like one of its pages.
(http://www.newtoncitizens.com)
In 1994, I was a member of the City of Newton Citizens' Telecommunications Policy Advisory Committee. I was also using the then-new technology known as "The World-Wide Web" in my working life, creating HTML pages to document the software applications I developed. I volunteered to create a prototype City website, and, obtaining free web space from Software Tool and Die, a local ISP, I created and launched
"The
Unofficial City of Newton Web Pages".
The site was an immediate hit, and, by the middle of 1995, I used it as the
basis for two sites: The City of Newton, Mass., Government Web Site, the official face of the city; and The Newton, Mass., Citizens Web Pages, a volunteer, non-profit site dedicated to promoting civic and cultural life in Newton.
I maintained the "official" site as a consultant to the Newton Free Library until December of 1997, by which time they had achieved the in-house expertise to develop and maintain it themselves. Unfortunately, the Internet
Archive has only preserved the main page of the site before it went in-house --
and that with the graphics broken. You can see it at
here.
As the Web has evolved, I have re-designed The Newton Citizens Web Pages several times, taking advantage of the ubiquity of JavaScript (but never assuming that all users have
JavaScript enabled), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and cgi/server side include (SSI) technology .
Newton League of Women Voters
This website grew out of a request from the League of Women Voters for
the City of Newton to host pages devoted to the League's work.
Since that request was really outside the charter of the City's web site,
I volunteered to design and host the site as a sub-site on the
Newton
Citizens Web Pages. As of December, 2004, the League is now maintaining
its own site, hosted by the national organization. You can, however,
see the site as it looked in February, 2004, courtesy of the Wayback Machine
at http://web.archive.org/web/20040215050246/www.newtoncitizens.com/LWV/.
New England M Users Group
(http://www.nemug.org
via the Internet Archive)
This is a site that I redesigned. The original site was frames-based, and, if a user had stumbled on an "inner page" via a search engine, he or she was unable to navigate to any other page on the site, due to the lack of hypertext links. I removed the frames design, and ensured that there were "table of contents" links on each page, both top and bottom, and generally made the site more maintainable. As a member of NEMUG, I continued to maintain this site as a volunteer for more than 5 years until the spring of 2005.
DernWeb
(http://www.dern.com)
This is another site I completely redesigned. Thanks to the Internet Archive (web.archive.org), you can
view the old site.
Besides re-organizing the pages, adding a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), and "thinning out" the index page, I designed and implemented a set of Server Side Include modules, so the owner of the site can now maintain the site by himself, editing, adding, and removing entire categories as well as pages.
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