Awarded
I’ve never done much in the way of award submission for my design work. It’s always been one of the things I’ve wanted to do, but as of yet, haven’t made it that far down my to do list. I love the idea of creating client work (or personal work) that can enlighten and influence its viewers, and submitting work via competition or contest is one of the best ways for a designer to reach that goal.
I was happy to receive a letter today from an educational organization announcing that the Oregon school district I’ve been working with has been listed amongst it’s top ten school websites for 2007. I’ve been helping Portland Public Schools to redesign / organize their landing page for the last several months. While the award is considered relatively small, the simple fact that I’ve been recognized for work I’m doing is quite satisfying.
The site itself is nothing too outstanding in terms of its look, but what we’ve tried to concentrate on more for this reorganization has been in the area of the site’s accessibility. Prior to starting this project the district’s website was desperately in need of modernization and structure. The front page was unorganized, chained into deeply nested tables and bogged down with scads of excess code. The menus were all graphically driven, and the site would breakdown on many levels depending on what browser you were viewing it in. Since then we have disassembled the site section-by-section and rebuilt it into a functional, well organized information center that provides timely information to the public and media.
There’s still more work to be done, but it’s nice to know that there is some recognition from outside organizations for the changes we are implementing. This also gets me motivated to actually submit some work to additional competitions.
For those of you who want the details, here they are:
Here is the district site when I started this project (courtesy of the Web Archive).
Here is the site after many of the accessibility and organizational changes.