Museum of the Gulf Coast
Another float in a parade
During the period 2002-2005 I worked with Justin McCullough (now manager of the online division of the Beaumont, Tex. Advertiser) and Chris Van Domelen (now a senior developer at Sightworks in Portland) on several projects. The Museum of the Gulf Coast site was one of these.
Step 1: CMS
During the first two quarters of 2005 Chris built a content management system intended for the sole use of Justin's shop, following on an earlier version inspired by Mambo. My own role in this work was to serve as a bulwark, translator, and mediator between Chris and Justin, whose philosophies of application deelopment were largely incompatible. My own line-level contributions to the project focussed on testing and specifying fixes subject to Justin's approval.
Postscript: During 2005 this CMS was a deployed on a total of five sites, of which only the Museum site remains in production as originally launched. Given the subsequent dissolution of Turning Minds Media - the company contracted to build these sites - the low survivability of the application comes as little suprise.
Step 2: Style
When Chris and I were tasked with putting the MotGC site into production, we were pleased to see that the requirements were straightforward, though I faced a salient challenge: I was given a flat, three column composite, with no styleguide or other assets from which to work.
One week after this comp was delivered, I'd managed to slice, dice, and clean the comp I'd been given into a standards-friendly layout.
Step 3: Customize and launch
The one remaining task prior to testing was to build a local search facility for the site, which Chris pulled off in record time through excellent use of MySQL's indexing capabilities.
From specification to launch, this site took form during a three-week period during which approximately thirty-five hours were billed, though the lion's share of the credit for this number goes to Chris.
The end client was solely responsible for populating the site.