design

Cordillera Interactive launched two more Montana site rebuilds this week in its Operation Tune-Up project: KTVQ.com in Billings and KXLH.com in Helena. Here's the before (left) and after.

The changes under the hood matter most in this project, as I described last week: lighter page weights and scripts mean faster load times and fewer nagging browser incompatibilities. Visually, we cleaned a lot of things up, but the differences should not be jarring or confusing to an occasional visitor.

We'll finish Montana sites quickly then move on to a series of launches in early October. As always, I welcome comments from my friends in the user experience and Web programming fields.

I have not shared much here about my new role leading Cordillera Interactive. I have wanted to, but had very little time to share stories of our rapid progress on this blog.

This week, we have something I'll pause to shout about.

Back in spring, we started a project to update the designs and underlying HTML/CSS architectures of our TV station.com sites. We named the project Operation Tune-Up.

Starting yesterday, we moved Operation Tune-Up out of the lab and onto its first site: KRTV.com in Great Falls, Montana. We still face a couple more days of inevitable debugging and clean-up work. But you can see the effects of Tune-Up on the KRTV.com home page, story pages and most index pages.

Thanks to Joey Martin, CI's senior director of operations, and his folks nationwide (with a special hat-tip to Neil Wagner in Billings, who also provided the terrific graphic design) for a successful launch!

We wanted big improvements in three key elements of the site user experience, and we think we got 'em:

• Site pages, especially the home page, load much faster. That, alone, justifies the project.
• Site content is easier to find.
• Stories are easier to read.

KTVQ.com in Billings is on deck for Tune-Up, and we'll start that launch process as soon as we winnow down the clean-up list for Great Falls. All Cordillera station.com sites get their own Tune-Ups before the end of the year.

Would I invest our limited resources in a Web tune-up if I felt the Web were dead? Maybe not, but I don't think it matters. My objectives in any interactive redesign project roll up into two main principles:

1. A redesign should make the next redesign faster and easier to execute. At some point, the pace of user interface innovation on the mainstream/consumer Web may begin to slow, but for now, the end of one design project still seems to signal the beginning of the next. So we have to cut the time and resource requirements to keep up.
2. A redesign should make it easier to collect, store and distribute all kinds of content assets using today's, and tomorrow's, communications forms. Get it from anywhere, anyone, anytime. Put it anywhere, with anyone, anytime. Seems simple, really isn't, but we should push to make it simpler with every project.

If we succeed at both of those, and the Web does die, we're still OK -- ready for smartphones, tablets, car-dash systems, home media centers or virtual carrier pigeons. Whatever we learn along the way, we can and should share with our paying customers -- advertising clients.

Hope you like the new KRTV.com!

Pin this on early-Monday-morning syndrome (if you haven't figured this out by now, I often write posts in the margins of my day, then set them to go live a few hours later when I figure folks are awake and paying attention). I meant, in that last post, to explain a key difference between the reasons people wanted my help as a consultant, and the reasons they should have. The distinction should matter to hiring managers in today's economy, and it applies far beyond my little world. So it's worth another post.

Most of the time, people solicited my help (and I served) as a resource. They wanted someone to design, build, and/or operate something for them.

The past several days had a way of reminding me why I wound down the types of part-time consulting I did most often as part of Small Initiatives.

My Scripps job keeps me hopping, now more than ever, as we rethink what it means to be a local news media company from this point forward. That rethinking also makes the job far more interesting, mostly in good ways. I am certainly not being denied the strategic responsibilities I coveted so long.

Meanwhile, consulting tasks people most frequently asked me to do when I ran SI -- and about which I still get questions most every day -- frankly become less interesting by the minute:

It takes a while to move around several years of blog posts and several more of static documents.

I managed to install a bit more of a design on JaySmall.com, notify Google of the changes, get server redirects working to preserve the old Small Initiatives content, get Ka's blog going on its own, and install some Drupal modules that make writing and editing easier.

Perhaps most important, SID made his way here, in a, like, groovy color-halftone form that brings some of my old world (newspapers and print design) to my "now" world (interactive media).

Much more to do, in my own sweet time.