Web Design and Development

I have been so busy between freelance and the full time job I haven’t had much time to update my site nor my blog with many posts. I figured I should post this soon since it has been almost a month since the launch.

Ann Taylor
Ann Taylor LOFT

Last year around this time I started doing my contract gig at Fry, it was the biggest step by far in my career and has led me to the great job at Niche Retail. Even though the sites aren’t perfect web standard examples (not by my choice!), It was still my first time working with a major nationally known development company. I worked with many engineers, system architects, and project managers. This is much different then the normal freelance jobs where you work with a client or are contracted out from a web firm.

I learned that the process is so much more complex in this environment, from building the site inside of java platform and having to compile the project just to see the changes, to committing the changes and waiting for it to be deployed to the dev server, where then people tell you there are changes to be made and you start the whole process over again. Not to mention the hours and hours of tasks that come from QA testing! Lets not forget updating the project and having tons of the engineers code conflicting with yours.

I think this is why I love my job so much now, not to mention the great company and their philosophy but working in side of something that is a bit more of a challenge then just coding some XHTML and CSS templates and handing them over. Its that added complexity that makes you strive to be the best at what you do. Where would we be if our jobs became easy and not challenge us anymore. The challenge being now to turn this platform into the best it can be in terms of Web Standards and Accessibility. We are way off but in the 3 months I have been here, we have made tremendous progress!

I have been really busy lately with work and other things in life, I barely have time to think. I wanted to show everyone what I have been working on at the job since starting. A lot of stuff we work on we don’t go as public about because it wouldn’t be professional to do so for our partners/affiliates, so I can’t always divulge all of our work.

Today we launched a Refresh (as we like call it), to our header and footers areas of the sites. This is more then just a redesign but an actual initial overhaul of the existing structure. We are also working on some great homepage redesigns for our sites. It has been a lot of fun and I’m really excited to see the results of the hard work we have been doing the last few months.

This was the first step in the right direction, in terms of cleaning up the front end code and really giving our sites an updated look and feel. There is still a lot of work to be done, so don’t bash me to quickly on what can use improvements, if your looking at the source code or CSS files. We have several e-commerce sites, so it is going to be a very tedious process, one that I like to look at as a war with many small battles. At the end I hope to bring our sites to the front of the pack in terms of web standards and e-commerce.

here are some of the sites to check out:

http://runbikes.com/
http://childcarriers.com/
http://bicycletrailers.com/
http://europeanstroller.com/

While your checking them out buy something for your kids, or your friends kid’s. You won’t get much of a better customer experience on any other e-commerce site.