Just Write

the setup is interesting.

Self-described as “a bunch of nerdy inter­views,” they basi­cally ask “What do peo­ple use to get the job done?” The inter­view ques­tions are all the same, con­sist­ing of four ques­tions:

1. Who are you, and what do you do?
2. What hard­ware are you using?
3. And what software?
4. What would be your dream setup?

Like most good intro­spec­tive exer­cises, you can approach it on dif­fer­ent levels–and with more or less rigor. Here are my answers:

Who are you and what do you do?

Michael Mont­gomery. Hus­band, father, lawyer, tech­nol­ogy fan, inter­net affi­cionado, speaker, orga­nizer, and write with a foun­tain pen. I blog some­times, and work for Christo­pher & Weis­berg as a reg­is­tered patent attor­ney and intel­lec­tual prop­erty lawyer. On the web, I play with markup & styling, teaches, presents, help with God­bit, Refresh­Laud­erdale and Refresh­Mi­ami.

What hard­ware are you using?

At work, I use a non­de­script box from a com­pany I won’t name, that’s been down­graded to XP for com­pat­i­bil­ity with Pro­Law, our office back-end. The dis­plays are a 19″ HP f1905 and another 19″ non­de­script sec­ond monitor.

At the office, I have a 30Gb iPod dri­ving Tivoli Audio Model Two stereo speakers.

My lap­top is an HP G70 with 4Gb of RAM and Vista Home Pre­mium. It came with a free upgrade to Win­dows 7, but I haven’t yet had the courage. At home, I use a 19″ HP L1945w and the lap­top as a sec­ond monitor.

I tend to carry an 8Gb iPhone, and usu­ally either a book or Mole­sk­ine note­book. And a pen.

And what software?

For browsers, I use Fire­fox and Chrome (mostly for apps like Gmail). For text and code, Notepad++ rocks. For doc­u­ments, I use OpenOf­fice Writer by choice and MS Word when required.

For web­sites, Textpat­tern usu­ally, Expres­sio­nEngine for larger projects, and Word­press for blogs. Drop­box (love it!) for syn­chro­niz­ing, and Jun­gle Disk (meh) for backup. Deli­cious for bookmarks.

Online I use Gmail, Google Cal­en­dar, Google Reader, Remem­ber the Milk, Read­er­naut, Ether­pad. I go by Mont­gomery most every­where. For games, LotRO, EVE and Babas Chess.

What would be your dream setup?

Vastly improved voice recog­ni­tion capability–so good it doesn’t require a head­set. I don’t under­stand why we’re all still typ­ing!

Corol­lary: kill the key­board and mouse. Long live the pen!

Part 2 of 2

Part 1 was pub­lished last week.

• MM:

You describe your role as “web devel­oper and infor­ma­tion archi­tect” includ­ing “Cold­Fu­sion, Javascript, HTML IA choices? Did you use any per­sonas or wireframes?

• DL:

Orga­niz­ing the con­tent can often be tricky, and there’s been a num­ber of dif­fer­ent struc­tures over the last sev­eral years. We knew we needed to clean things up, and we wanted to group the con­tent together more over­all. In the col­le­giate world, there are a lot of phrases that maybe aren’t the best but are com­mon­place and expected, so we did a lot of research to see what kind of lib­er­ties we could get away with. We ended up with two wire­frames, and con­ducted some focus groups and user test­ing to see what was most successful.

• MM:

Tell us about “Biola red.”

• DL:

Pan­tone #185. Biola’s col­ors are red and white, so our web sites need to fea­ture that color in some capac­ity. Usu­ally it’s just in the mark, but on the Under­grad site it’s used more prominently.

• MM:

One of Godbit’s pre­miere inter­view­ers, Yan­nick Lyn Fatt, had some ques­tions for you on the forum:

what was the inspi­ra­tion for the design (also the print design since the web­site was based on that)? I’m guess­ing the fact that the Uni­ver­sity is in SoCal had some­thing to do with it (cor­rect me if I’m wrong) but the design is cer­tainly unusual for a school website.

• DL:

Here’s Jes­sica Nel­son on that:

The gen­eral con­cept behind the design was the idea of con­ver­sa­tion. We wanted the stu­dents and par­ents to feel like the uni­ver­sity was invit­ing them in to Biola’s cul­ture. The mor­ph­ing that occurs in a lot of the illus­tra­tions comes from the idea that Biola is a uni­ver­sity whose faith is inte­grated into every major – and that the cam­pus on the whole is very inte­grated. We wanted to com­mu­ni­cate the com­mu­nity that exists here, and the crossover between majors

* YL:

Also what was the message/feeling that you wanted peo­ple to get from the design of the web­site. Did the prin­ci­pal and other admin­is­tra­tors give you and your team free reign over the design? Did they play a role in giv­ing you ideas for the design?

• DL:

I’ll let Brian Miller, who was the project man­ager for the entire Biola Under­grad cam­paign, answer that one:

When stu­dents visit our web­site or read our ads or print mate­ri­als we want them to expe­ri­ence a high level of qual­ity, pro­fes­sion­al­ism and clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion that leaves the dis­tinct impres­sion that Biola is a uni­ver­sity focused on its mis­sion to equip men and women to impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ. The design style itself is not intended to be the focus, but rather the back­drop to the mes­sage we want to communicate. We believe the design and lay­out will serve to draw peo­ple in and set a back­ground tone that enhances a curi­ous student’s expe­ri­ence with Biola as they explore.

Biola admin­is­tra­tion has been very sup­port­ive of our endeav­ors to cre­ate qual­ity mar­ket­ing materials. They have empow­ered us to make deci­sions that are in the best inter­est of the uni­ver­sity and we are very thank­ful for that.

• MM:

Your blog men­tioned the lack of “an ele­gant Cold­Fu­sion solu­tion”, that you “needed some­thing new”:

fol­low­ing the MVC/MTV as much as I could (it’s the Django influ­ence on me) and the cus­tom tag I designed merely includes two files. The first is some­thing like a Django view except of course it doesn’t deter­mine which tem­plate will be called; it just sets up some vari­ables that the tem­plate will have access to. The sec­ond is the base tem­plate that the con­tent page is extending.

So, is that a cus­tom CMS, or what exactly in the backend?

• DL:

It’s not a full-fledged CMS because most of the con­tent sit in html files on the server and are browsed to directly. That’s why it’s only mar­gin­ally sim­i­lar to Django tem­plates. Pieces of con­tent are man­aged by a Cold­Fu­sion solu­tion I designed (a “per­son­al­iza­tion sys­tem” for lack of a bet­ter name). All the links in the footer and the coun­selor greet­ings and pho­tos are from that sys­tem. Of course that makes it com­pli­cated when some of your con­tent is in the file sys­tem and some is in a data­base. But when you’re deal­ing with a server that doesn’t have regex URL han­dling… well you do what you can.

• MM:

The “per­son­al­iza­tion sys­tem” sounds inter­est­ing, as a way of per­son­al­iz­ing the site based on each person’s activ­ity. You say “It’s cur­rently only being used in a few places; one of the unfor­tu­nate real­i­ties is no one has a lot of time to sit and think about what’s pos­si­ble.” Any thoughts on how it works and whether it can that be automated?

• DL:

It’s based on the infor­ma­tion the vis­i­tor gives us as well as basic visit pat­terns, and on the con­cept of “goals” that the admis­sions staff wants each vis­i­tor to accom­plish (which could be com­plet­ing a form or just vis­it­ing a spe­cific page). The value, or pres­ence or absence, of any one of these bits of data can be lever­aged to influ­ence pretty much any­thing on the site.

For exam­ple, every fea­ture on the home page could be adjusted to adver­tise events or con­tent that is most likely appro­pri­ate from where you’re at in your research and inter­est in Biola. Or, every sin­gle stu­dent quote could be from stu­dents that are from a sim­i­lar eco­nomic or cul­tural back­ground. There’s a lot of poten­tial. Ulti­mately, I think the sys­tem will need to be imple­mented in some­thing like Django in order for that poten­tial to be real­ized. Split­ting up con­tent between data­base and file sys­tem is a hindrance.

• MM:

Any spe­cific chal­lenges bring­ing the print design of the cam­paign to the web?

• DL:

One of the tougher chal­lenges was keep­ing file size down. The many graph­ics and tex­tures made that very dif­fi­cult. In the end, it’s still a pretty hefty down­load but it could have been worse.

• MM:

I noticed the default blue+underline links; is that for acces­si­bil­ity purposes?

• DL:

One of our high­est pri­or­i­ties was to make the infor­ma­tion easy to find. The cre­ative ele­ments and illus­tra­tions are very impor­tant, but we wanted the con­tent itself to be clean and read­able, and links to be obvi­ous. I think that’s why we didn’t stray far from the default blue.

• MM:

Elas­tic lay­out, very nice.

• DL:

Thanks! That was a fea­ture I was very inter­ested in adding. I cre­ated an ear­lier ver­sion of the core lay­out CSS, and it used em-based dimen­sions so that the lay­out would enlarge or dimin­ish based on the font size you had set. We quickly real­ized that sort of approach wasn’t best for our core audi­ence, and Tim worked on imple­ment­ing the elas­tic lay­out you see now. It’s one of my favorite ele­ments, espe­cially the ban­ners at the tops of the main pages that adjust to the size change.

• MM:

Search­ing the site for “web design” yields zero results. Does Biola teach web design/development, and do they teach web standards?

• DL:

Unfor­tu­nately you’ve stum­bled across a weak­ness there: it’s not a full-text search, just keyword-based and we’re miss­ing a few key­words. Biola does in fact have an excel­lent art major BFA and a design empha­sis. While tra­di­tion­ally much more print-oriented, the web courses are get­ting better.

A friend of mine has started teach­ing the classes and he’s very standards-aware and teaches CSS and valid XHTML. I had the oppor­tu­nity to guest lec­ture last year, and will be involved again this year so I’m really look­ing for­ward to that. The inter­est in web design is grow­ing, and I’m really hop­ing more stu­dents come into the pro­gram with the pas­sion to learn and excel. Look for great things to come from Biola-trained web designers!

• MM:

Any rec­om­men­da­tions for new web design­ers? How did you learn, and how should new web design­ers learn?

• DL:

The desire to learn is most impor­tant. Get your hands dirty. Learn how to write semantically-meaningful markup (you need good source mate­r­ial). Start play­ing around with as much CSS as you can. Don’t know what a spe­cific prop­erty does? Find out! And get inspired by scour­ing the web for great designs. Fig­ure out how they did what they did. Then start adding to your arse­nal with things like DOM script­ing and frame­works. The more you know about the big­ger pic­ture of web devel­op­ment, the bet­ter a designer you’ll be. Oh, and attend Biola.

• MM:

Thanks again.

• DL:

Thank you, Michael, it’s been a plea­sure.

This arti­cle is © Mont­gomery 2007. Some rights released with a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Also pub­lished at God­bit.

Dave Lowe is a web devel­oper at Biola Uni­ver­sity, and was respon­si­ble for the redesign of their under­grad­u­ate web­site, which received some awards and sparked some dis­cus­sion in the forum at God­bit. I recently had a chance to inter­view him, and obtain more infor­ma­tion from his team about the redesign.

---

Note: Part 1 of 2. Part 2 will be pub­lished next week.

• Michael Mont­gomery:

You work for Biola’s IMC Design Stu­dio as the web devel­oper for the Web Group. How (and when) did you start in the field, and with Biola Uni­ver­sity?

• Dave Lowe:

I cre­ated my first web site (if I recall cor­rectly, it was on Geoc­i­ties) in my fresh­man year of col­lege back in 1996. At first it was just some movie quotes, and then I uti­lized it for book lists and Ama­zon affil­i­ate links. A few years later I started work­ing with Cold­Fu­sion through a stu­dent job I had in the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy depart­ment. Dur­ing my senior year, a good friend who was work­ing for Admis­sions as their web guy decided to move out of state and rec­om­mended me for the position.

Web design was very inter­est­ing to me because it com­bined what I was study­ing (art) with my back­ground in pro­gram­ming. And frankly, I was about to grad­u­ate and had no clue what I was going to do next so it was a very wel­come oppor­tu­nity. That was back in 2000, and I’ve been work­ing here ever since.

For the first 5 years I worked for Enroll­ment Man­age­ment, out­side of the more cen­tral­ized mar­ket­ing and IT groups, but man­ag­ing and devel­op­ing some of the most impor­tant uni­ver­sity sites. A year and a half ago, my posi­tion was trans­ferred into Inte­grated Mar­ket­ing Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (a move I advo­cated and am grate­ful for, because it’s the right place for this posi­tion to be situated).

• MM:

What would you be doing oth­er­wise, and what were you doing before?

• DL:

I’d def­i­nitely be work­ing on the web, no escap­ing that. Before this, of course, I was attend­ing col­lege (at Biola).

• MM:

Share a lit­tle about your faith?

• DL:

I grew up in a Chris­t­ian home and in a very priv­i­leged area (Santa Bar­bara). In junior high, I went through a dark period (who didn’t, right?) and for the first time real­ized the empti­ness of life apart from God. My youth pas­tor at the time was a pas­sion­ate believer and the way he lived his life was a pow­er­ful exam­ple of God’s redemp­tive work and love for us. Still, I wouldn’t say I really had a true per­sonal and liv­ing faith until I started attend­ing Biola and grap­pling with truth and com­mu­nity. That’s when I knew I not only needed God’s grace, but wanted to fol­low Him with all that I am.

At this point in my life, I’m find­ing myself more and more often just being amazed by God. I’ve been read­ing through the Old Tes­ta­ment a lot more over the last three to four years, and, man!, that has been an awe­some cat­a­lyst of growth. I was always bored by the OT when I was a kid, or won­der­ing what the point was and just want­ing to read the New Tes­ta­ment. I was miss­ing a ton! It’s incred­i­ble, exhil­a­rat­ing, and mind-boggling how God so clearly illus­trates his ulti­mate plan of sac­ri­fic­ing his Son for our sake through­out his­tory. I know few things more strongly than this, that I will never cease to learn from the Bible, no mat­ter how long I’m on this earth.

• MM:

What are the ben­e­fits and chal­lenges of work­ing as an in-house devel­oper? At a uni­ver­sity? At a Chris­t­ian university?

• DL:

Good ques­tion. There are some great obvi­ous pluses: con­sis­tent pay­check, great work ben­e­fits (vaca­tion time, 401k, med­ical and den­tal), sta­bil­ity and peace of mind. But it’s much more than that. I work in an incred­i­ble depart­ment filled with peo­ple that make me happy to come to work every day. Work­ing at a uni­ver­sity means that I work pretty much on the same site, or net­work of sites, all the time which can be a lit­tle repet­i­tive. But there’s also a broad range of con­tent and audi­ences too, so it keeps things inter­est­ing and challenging.

IMC has the rare bless­ing (within the uni­ver­sity world) of hav­ing the mar­ket­ing respon­si­bil­ity for the entire orga­ni­za­tion. On the down­side, that means a lot can go wrong and there’s the poten­tial for clients to become dis­grun­tled because they have to work with us. But the impor­tance of con­sis­tent brand­ing and expe­ri­ence can’t be overstated.

And finally, this is a strong, evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity, so work­ing here is in part a min­istry and a con­stant moti­vat­ing fac­tor for me to do my best work. Biola’s mis­sion is equip­ping men and women in mind and char­ac­ter to impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ, not to sell more prod­ucts or increase share prices. That’s huge.

The main chal­lenges … well I have to be hon­est, because it’s a uni­ver­sity, there’s always going to be the pos­si­bil­ity of a lesser stan­dard of qual­ity. It doesn’t have to be like that, but the envi­ron­ment makes it a lit­tle eas­ier for it to hap­pen. Just look at how my career here began: for the first two or three years I was mak­ing it up as I went along, basi­cally learn­ing on the job.

When I started read­ing the blogs of guys like Jeremy Keith, Dan Ceder­holm and Andy Budd, my eyes were opened to a whole new world. I decided to get seri­ous and learn how to excel at my craft (even if it meant re-learning every­thing I thought I knew). My boss at the time didn’t know any­thing about what I did, or how I should be doing it bet­ter. I think that’s com­mon­place in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s not commercially-driven.

The other huge chal­lenge is not hav­ing full con­trol over what we’re respon­si­ble for (the web­site). IT has his­tor­i­cally con­trolled “the com­puter” which started out being just one or a few com­put­ers and now is the stan­dard com­puter setup for fac­ulty & staff, and the servers, includ­ing the web servers. IT doesn’t really under­stand what the web is all about, and still views this whole inter­net thing in terms of “appli­ca­tions” (which all too often means some­thing as sim­ple as a con­tact form) and “look and feel.” So we’re locked out of some pretty crit­i­cal areas. It’s under­stand­able and it’s a process, but it can still be extremely frustrating.

• MM:

Describe your biggest work accom­plish­ment, and failure?

• DL:

I’ll go with the redesign of Biola Under­grad for my biggest work accom­plish­ment. It was a com­plete redesign and I’m very proud of the final prod­uct. It was the first site we’d done that was built on web stan­dards. It’s not per­fect but I like to think it’s pretty darn close, all things considered.

It also helped us estab­lish some other stan­dards, like form markup and behav­ior. It’s a close call though because we just relaunched the main biola.edu, and we’re going to be con­vert­ing the entire site over the next year. So that’s going to be a pretty big thing if we succeed.

Biggest fail­ure: I spent a lot of time a num­ber of years ago try­ing to build a slew of con­tent man­age­ment tools for my divi­sion and beyond. It was well-intentioned but doomed to fail­ure. Some are still in use, but I think I could have used my time bet­ter (espe­cially if it meant I learned about web stan­dards earlier).

• MM:

The new redesign of the Biola Uni­ver­sity under­grad­u­ate site is quite a bold depar­ture from prior designs, and other uni­ver­sity sites in gen­eral. Your blog post said, “I’m also pretty cer­tain that there isn’t another uni­ver­sity web site like this out there.” You could say that again.

• DL:

I’m pretty cer­tain there isn’t another uni­ver­sity web site like this out there!

I’ll take a minute here to credit the peo­ple behind it. So much of this is due to the work of the out­side design­ers who came up with the print design, one of whom is Jes­sica Nel­son (who now works for us at Biola), as well as my cre­ative direc­tor, Brian Miller, who led the project. Tim Beard­s­hear is the web designer who trans­lated the design onto the web, so I can’t say enough about his work. And finally, the clients for the project, Josh Smith and Andre Stephens in Under­grad Admis­sions. These are some of the peo­ple I’m proud and lucky to work with.

• MM:

The site earned sev­eral awards, includ­ing the front pages of Style­gala and CSS Remix. Any other awards?

• DL:

We’ve got­ten a lot of men­tions across the web, which has been really neat to see. Vit­a­min men­tioned the site in their “best sites of the week” recently too. The print cam­paign has received CASE and Admis­sions Mar­ket­ing Report awards.

• MM:

How did the unique illus­tra­tion style come about, and how was it shep­herded through the university’s stake­hold­ers? Why did it take two years? Any­thing you would do differently?

• DL:

Our mar­ket­ing and admis­sions teams con­ducted a full year of research, includ­ing sur­veys, inter­views and focus groups, to get valu­able insight into design pref­er­ences, con­tent pre­sen­ta­tion, etc. One of the styles pre­sented dur­ing the focus groups was this photo illus­tra­tion style, and it quickly became a clear pref­er­ence for the stu­dents. The pro­duc­tion phase then took another year for the print and the web site (with the excep­tion that I had started work­ing on what would become the per­son­al­iza­tion sys­tem dur­ing that first year).

• MM:

What suc­cess cri­te­ria were selected, and what were/are the results?

• DL:

CSS show­cases around the web, we were also see­ing very low bounce rates on the Under­grad home page

• MM:

• DL:

Thanks! Now web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity is the norm in our office.

Note: Part 1 of 2. Part 2 will be pub­lished next week.

This arti­cle is © Mont­gomery 2007. Some rights released with a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Also pub­lished at God­bit.