Steven J Hagen

I started working on RichmondGov.Com back in April and over the last six months I am starting to think that I am getting the full scope of what the website is covering. it sounds like i am stupid when I say that but I am coming into an already huge website. and dealing with e-government application, code re-use issue, and to be true more than a little over design.

I can know start talking intelligently about the website and the work that I am trying to do on it and how to build that as a project that reflects some sort of management model. I have done a lot of thinking about agile and how it works well for product and code release but I am not sure it is working for me in the Website management yet.

The current site is here the City of Richmond or as it is called RichmondGov.com looking at the site you can see that it is a strong site. That is not me patting my own back but actually commenting on the great design work of the people that were here before me. Especially for when the site was intially designed. Well that is a good question how is the design I am thinking that it close to three or four years old. Looking at the Internet Archive the Wayback Machine show the first saving of this design Feb 10, 2005 and it most likely took a year to design and approve. So the technology that did the design was much more limited then it is today.

So the main navigation is done in flash and is database driven. It has a three column design that is done in tables with a limited real estate due to the desire to keep that look of the first page above the fold.

Now my adventure is going to be redirect the background code yet keeping the design the same. So that is what the blog here is gong to be covering.