The first Web site I designed and maintained (between 1998 and 1999), the site of my hometown newspaper the St. Thomas Times-Journal, recently underwent a major overhaul! Check 'er out at stthomastimesjournal.com.
It's been a while in coming. Back in 1998 I designed the 2nd generation of the site. The newspaper had been online since 1997, a pretty early date in the history of the World Wide Web, impressive especially for a small community newspaper. The original Webmaster had left for another job, and a piecemeal staff of editors with more important things to do had been organized to make updates. That's when I was hired to design a new framework for the site, add new content to it, and make daily updates. By the time I left the paper 1.3 years later to attend university, the site had undergone constant revisions, each update adding new functionality and making the design more user-friendly.
After I left, the same staff that updated the site prior to my employment was reassembled to make daily updates. The responsibility was later passed on to the design department, which I can only assume contained staff with limited Web design experience. Over the course of 5 years, the site went from a design that was reflective of next-gen Web standards to one that looked increasingly like it was developed pre-1995. The main logo was barely visible, frames were poorly implemented, and site functionality was limited.
So, given that history, needless to say I am VERY EXCITED that someone has breathed new life into my "pet project" of 5+ years ago by reassembling it and giving it a new coat of paint! :)
Huh. Hhmmmmmm. Commenting on the Times-Journal brings up fond memories of just exactly how I came to design Web sites, which activity has been an outlet of creative energy and a source of much-needed cash over the years. There IS a story here, so let me share it.......
*****
It was the summer of 1998, and 5 months earlier I had gone from 2 jobs to no jobs. I had quit my Burger King job -- which I had slaved at for almost 2 years, during which time my hourly wage decreased by a nickel (go figure!) that January. A month later, I lost my other part-time job to downsizing: the company went from the owner and me to the owner without me. Ouch!
Anyways, my twelfth grade graduation was 12 days away, and I needed to make some serious cash if I wanted to save enough to attend university in just over a year.
That's when a job ad in my local newspaper caught my eye. "Newspaper looking for staff to work in the press room." Press room? You mean I get to work side-by-side with my city's famed journalists and reporters?? (To clarify, my city, more like a town, was and is still home to 30,000 souls, not enough at the time to sustain 2 shopping malls and just enough to sustain a single non-fast food restaurant.) I was super-excited. The ad appealed to my interest in English and writing in general, and computers in particular. So I applied. Little did I know.
The press room was not the location where hard news was written. Rather, it was the home of my town's 10 most alcoholic men (there were a few exceptions) and the most gigantic and grungy piece of machinery I had ever seen: a full-scale printing press at least 20 years old, with the necessary accumulated grease and rust. The job -- working 12 hours a day -- was to load gigantic roles of newsprint onto the beast, change the press-sized print cartridges, and transfer newspaper-after-printed-newspaper from the press onto skids to be forklifted away.
I accepted the job.
I was desperate!
It was my first, and only, job involving manual labour.
I hated it!
But, you see, there was an escape clause -- a way out, if you will -- that eventually got me from the press room with the alkies to the 2nd floor offices and a desk next to the town's famed reporters. In fact, I got one right beside the paper's -- how should I say this -- "most colourful" columnnist, Bob Meharg. Deep within the recesses of the Times-Journal's human resources department (okay, it's staffed by a single individual who's also responsible for all the accounting, too!), they noticed that my resume contained zero manual labour experience, and lots of writing and computer experience. So, in addition to sending a copy of it to the press room manager, they also sent a copy directly to the publisher.
On the day of my interview, I dressed to the nines, expecting to meet and be interviewed by a rash of journalists. Instead, I was taken to the inner bowls of the newspaper's offices and given a tour of the printing presses before my 15-minute interview with the press room manager. That's when things got interesting. Really interesting.
From the press room I was taken to the publisher's office where I met with the human resources / accounting manager and the publisher herself. They proceeded to ask me some pointed questions. For example: "How fast can you type?" 100 words per minute. "Wow, really?" Yep. "Okay, will you take a typing test?" Err, okay, sure. Typing test results: 60 words per minute. (There was a solid justification for this decrease of 40 words per minute: a very old and decrepit keyboard.) Another example: "Can you design Web sites?" Absolutely. My Web design experience: very, VERY limited. You see, about 3 months previously, my buddy told me how he was learning how to create Web sites in his data and word processing class (a class I should have taken again, given the fact the previous year I had received a 95% average, a $100 cheque for scoring the class' highest grade, and learned how to play more computer games than I ever had before). It sounded cool, so I asked him if I could take a look at his codes. He shared them with me, and for 3 months I played around with them, learning only how to change background colours, alter font attributes, and create tables.
The end result of the interview? The publisher told me that while I wasn't as qualified as other applicants for the press room job, I would be hired for it on a temporary basis for 6 weeks if afterwards I would work in the office in accounting and designing a new Web site for the paper. I readily accepted.
For 6 weeks I toiled in the press room with 10 renegade members of AA. The 12-hour days didn't allow me time to even think of how I was going to design a full-fledged Web site, let alone begin learning how to create one. Six weeks later, I had my own little desk and personal computer in the publisher's 25' x 25' office, creating Web pages. How did I do it? Well, I'd toil away for 8 hours a day trying to figure out what to do, and then for 2-3 hours at night I'd research what I needed to know for the next day. Designing static and animated graphics, inserting images, creating frames and online forms, adding hyperlinks, and incorporating sound were just a few of the design elements I self-taught myself at home, before taking my new-found expertise to the office the next day and incorporating it into the newspaper's Web site.
Six weeks later, I had developed 150-sheets worth of computations and accounting and financial forms for 2 corporately-owned newspapers ..... AND designed my very first Web site. Yay for me!
Not so fast.
Getting that site from my computer onto the Web proved to be another problem onto itself. You see, in the code for each page I had developed, I had referenced images and files where they were stored and located on MY computer, not where they would be once they were online. So when I uploaded the site the first time, all the images were broken and none of the links worked. OMG! What to do, what to do. For 3 days, I tried and I tried and I tried to figure it out. Finally, by the end of the 3rd day, conversing with the corporate Web guru located in Alberta, we figured out the problem, I fixed it, and the Times-Journal had a new-look Web site with a ton more content and lots of happy customers and Web surfers.
And I was the star. My picture appeared in ads in the print edition of the paper 2-3 times a week, proclaiming me as the "whiz" behind the Web site. That was kind of cool. But what I found even cooler was where I got to sit day-in and day-out for the next 1.3 years I worked at the paper: with the reporters and editors, and beside the paper's most colourful journalist of all, Bob Meharg. It was where I had wanted to be since I first read the ad: "Newspaper looking for staff to work in the press room."
*****
So that's the story. From illiterate Web designer to the whiz behind the Web site. All in a day's -- or month's -- work :)
I put in so much effort, invested in so many non-reportable hours, and shed so many frustrating tears over that site. So I'm happy to see that someone has poured their own heart and shed their own frustrating tears into it, and am looking forward to keeping up with the news back home via someone else's "pet project". Super job!
I decided to get a digicam with specs lower than what I was originally looking for in a camera: cheap enough to buy the accessories that don't come with digicams, such as memory that holds more than 10 pictures, or rechargeable batteries that I don't have to throw out after 10 minutes of use! :) I was originally looking for a digicam that had a larger LCD screen and more scene modes. Some of the newer cameras have at least a 1.8" LCD screen, modes for beach and snow, and modes that differentiate between portrait and landscape pics at night. However, I'm super-satisfied with what I've got; really good value considering cameras with these additional features cost an additional $150+. Aaahhhhhh!!
