We just completed re-designing the Wesley College web site

I’m really proud of the new Wesley College web site, which was just re-designed by Delaware.Net and which will launch this Thursday (March 22, 2007) on the College’s “Founder’s Day”. We’ve also designed a new HTML Flash mass email that will go out to the College’s mailing list. Wesley College is a local university whose web site really needed some help. It consisted of thousands of static web pages that were designed in Microsoft FrontPage. That’s right – FrontPage.

FrontPage is a program that beginner web developers used to use years ago to manage their web sites, but no one that is any good at web development or site management really uses it any longer. It has been replaced by Contribute and Dreamweaver, which are much better tools. Both programs belong to Adobe, and this is one of the reasons that Delaware.Net is primarily an Adobe shop – meaning that we mainly use Adobe products to build web sites, graphics, and applications. Programs like Dreamweaver 2008, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flash, Adobe Contribute, Adobe Flex, Adobe Spry, and many others.

What makes this project special? Why am I proud of it? Because our new team built it and did such a great job!

Compared with 2006, Delaware.Net has several new faces in our team. Also compared with our capabilities of only just a year ago, we’ve come a really long, long way.

Our new Creative Director (CD) is Christine Fairbanks. Christine’s last job was as a CD at an advertising agency in New York, where she led a team of eight designers. Some web development companies may give the CD title loosely to a graphic designer, but Christine is a REAL Creative Director. She leads our creative team like no one before her. She has practical project management experience. She tracks time and communicates as a project manager with our clients. She meets with clients to develop the perfect design concepts. She has extensive print design experience. She comes up with custom design ideas on her own. She doesn’t leave at 5:01PM when there is a deadline. She shows up to work on time. Believe it or not, its hard to find all of those qualities in one professional.

Christine came into the Wesley project halfway, and inherited a design concept from another designer. Even after the design was complete, the thousands of existing web pages in the site had to be touched, because the site had navigation elements placed into every page of the web site – a big no-no. That is how the original site was design by a previous developer that Wesley had hired. Christine organized our creative team and we had 5 people all working on the site to meet the tight deadlines that the College had placed on the project. This is one of several projects that Delaware.Net is working on for Wesley, but it has the most importance and the largest scope because the previous site (which is live at www.wesley.edu until this Thursday) had grown old enough that it became a liability to the college. The new web site is a great improvement for Wesley, and our work passed final approval this week.

Wesley wants to keep the new site design a secret until it launches, so I can’t show it to you now. Watch for a press release when we officially launch the site.

I’d like to close this post by thanking our new team who worked so hard to get this project completed on time. Great job team!