Origin Design

Origin Design - homepage

Website: no longer online - view screenshots

Size: 100+ pages

My professional status: contractor and then employee at Origin Design

Website client: Origin Design

Dates: January 2001 - November 2003

Categories: Client liaison, IA & UX, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, Content-loader, Webmaster, jQuery/JavaScript, Old-school table layout, Flash, No CMS, Medium sites

Brief: to develop, rebuild and improve on the existing Origin site, and to bring an added level of ideas and cool stuff to the site.

My responsibilities included:

  • Checking and improving on the existing HTML on the site
  • Planning new sections, adding pages to existing sections - HTML, DHTML, popups, JavaScript, graphics, Flash
  • Development and creation of an interactive Flash animation for the Environ section of the website, where I followed the designer's storyboard sketches and created some elements (like the spinning house) in 3D animation software before bringing it into Flash
  • Advising Origin designers on the technical aspects of the site
  • Before I left the company I ran a series of staff HTML training sessions using my HTML with Dreamweaver course notes as a starting-point - enabling the staff members who would be taking over responsibility for the website to edit it and keep it updated.

We worked on this site when we weren't building sites for our clients - which wasn't very often, so work tended to get done piecemeal - but we were constantly thinking up new and funky bits to add to the site - and ways in which we could utilise the website even more fully as a customer service tool. In three years we redesigned and changed aspects of the architecture and navigation three times - it was a never-ending refinement process.