DrieStone Design
The Portfolio of Jonathan Sweet
When you’re a newspaper catering to the business leaders of Connecticut, you need a web site that reflects the quality and professionalism of your periodical.
ForeSite has partnered with the Hartford Business Journal on a variety of projects over the last few years, so when the HBJ decided to build a new web site from the ground up, ForeSite was there to lay the groundwork.
The original HBJ web site was a simple affair. The design stood, unchanged, for more then five years. Every page was still manually edited, and the content was very limited. Working with ForeSite, a specification was built to create something special that was more befitting the newspaper. The new site was built to be managed dynamically so that the HBJ staff doesn’t need to write a single line of HTML to keep it updated. In addition, it was the goal of the HBJ to move from weekly information (where they’d update two articles each week), to daily and even hourly information.
Features
The HBJ site was an ambitious piece of programming. Although we could have found an off-the-shelf CMS system that could have done some of the things we wanted it to, we decided to write everything from scratch. In the end, this was the right decision. The system isn’t overloaded with features the client doesn’t use, and the interface is straight forward and written specifically with the HBJ in mind.
News articles can be automatically important from the source Quark documents. This means that the HBJ staff doesn’t have to spend time copying and pasting text. The system manages a lot of the grunt work for them (although human oversight is needed for verification).
Responsibilities
ForeSite built everything end-to-end, including a user-friendly CMS back end to allow modification of the site. I was responsible for the front-end look-and-feel including: site design, XHTML & CSS coding, and the majority of the JavaScript work. I was also worked with the primary developer on some of the back-end PHP coding.