Archives
Ever since I joined The Pleiad staff, I have longed for the opportunity to redesign the paper’s Web site. Well… now I’m learning to be careful what I wish for.
Not that I am not glad that I am the one that was given the chance to overhaul it. It just is turning out to be a much more convoluted project than I had anticipated.
Years of revolving Web editors who all had their own ideas on how the site should look and be organized has left the design side of the site in total disarray. Formatting isn’t consistent through the site–particularly in the archives. Some years, stories are organized by page, presented in 12 pt. Times New Roman on a stark white background and stacked on top of each other. Others are available only in PDFs of the pages as they appeared in the paper. Still more are displayed in old Web page themes, which are in various states of disrepair due to broken hyperlinks.
Ah, broken hyperlinks. When I ran an initial error report on the site, I was appalled to get the results. There were over 1,400 broken hyperlinks in the site! So… rather than trying to track down the intended destinations of all of those hyperlinks, I opted to simply recreate the archives. Which is more than enough of a job itself. All of the different formats that I just got done describing makes for slow going through the archives.
But I’m plugging along, and I’m almost halfway through now. And the way that I’m formatting the theme for the Web site, future Web editors who want to redesign the theme can make changes to one or two pages and the rest of the site will automatically be updated to reflect those changes. So hopefully no one else ever has to do this. 