Posted: February 15

Tah Dah! The new site is up and running

(Rome) I feel a bit like the iris that just opened the first flowers of the spring after a long winter. Well, even though it never gets all that cold in Rome, the long months of early dusk make last summer feel ever so far away. And I started redesigning our web site even before the summer. The desire to redo the site began with the Jescom pages. I liked them so much better than the older design, that I just kept going, starting from the ground up. The meeting of the Jesuit web masters of Europe got me thinking about how to use cascading style sheets to simplify page design. Eventually, I decided not to go overboard, since the promise of CSS does not yet live up to what I hoped. But I redid the whole thing, and am very pleased with the results, which went live online on Monday. The biggest change was to take the concept of "portal" much further than I did before. Now the site freely mixes content that we have on our own servers with content from Jesuit web sites in other places.

The recent back-drop of my work has been the attention that Apple has gotten recently for its newest products such as the iPhone. I have been a loyal Mac user almost from the very beginning of that computer's existence (along with new products like Photoshop version 1.0). Even though I manage a good sized office full of PCs running Windows, I still do most of my own work on a Mac. The main attraction is, I think, Apple's attention to design. The iPod does an incredible job of simplifying how the user chooses what songs to play with just a little flick of the finger. This approach is the complete opposite of the old videotape players, that were almost impossible to program. The Apple team continues to stand out for its innovation in design. It is a permanent attitude that I appreciate. In my own humble way, that is what I have tried to do with sjweb. Many of the early testers of the new design commented on how simple and easy it is to use. Great. That response is music to my ears. We actually have a ton of content, but it the site seems easy and quick to move around, then I feel like all the hours have been to good use. When spring does finally get here, I will be ready to give in to the temptation to play hooky.