Duke Divinity School launched its redesigned web site on Monday at http://divinity.duke.edu. Viget worked with the Divinity School and Duke Web Services to redefine the site's information architecture, user experience design, and visual design. Here's what the site looked like before the redesign:
The Divinity School wanted to refresh the site's look and feel while incorporating richer media content into the redesigned site, including more vivid photography and more video.
Our user experience team got started by collaborating with multiple stakeholders to organize existing pages and site sections into a site map. Once we identified some key page templates, we laid out the home page and several interior pages as wireframes. An excerpt from the home page wireframe is shown below.
Continue reading "A Divine Redesign"
Last month marked the end of the second quarter, and per tradition we held our State of the Labs meeting and celebrated with a Viget team event. When planning an event for 40+ people, it's difficult to find activities that everyone will enjoy, but this Third Third Thursday (TTT) event proved that it’s not impossible. Both the Falls Church and Durham offices participated in some type of cooking event.
Continue reading "Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen"
Three years ago this week we opened Viget's first remote office in Durham, NC. I am proud to say that what started out as a bit of an experiment has become a big success. We've been able to grow our Durham staff from 3 to 14 (close to capacity at our second office!).
We've worked with great local clients including Duke, NC Gives, the NC chapter of Easter Seals, Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC, and Spoonflower, in addition to all the non-local projects to which we've contributed. We've facilitated Refresh the Triangle for about two and a half years, which has been a terrific way to connect with other designers and developers in the area. As individuals, we've bought houses, had kids, acquired pets, written books, and had a lot of fun.
On a personal note, I joined Viget in March of 2007 with the responsibility of getting the Durham office off the ground. After doing everything from yard work to recruiting (and losing a lot of ping pong games in between), I feel like I can finally say, "I did it!" Of course, I couldn't have done it without Viget HQ, Ben and Peyton (who moved down from Virginia to help get things going), all of the current staff, and this supportive community. It's nice to take a few minutes to eat cake, celebrate the milestone, and dream about what the next three years might bring!
We at Viget Labs are pleased and proud that Duke.edu earned a Bronze Award in the Complete Institutional Web Site category of the 2010 CASE Circle of Excellence awards.
Viget worked last fall with Duke University's Office of News and Communications to design the home page and secondary Spotlight pages for the university's web site.
CASE (The Council for Advancement and Support of Education) received 54 entries in this category and awarded one gold, one silver, and two bronze prizes. The Circle of Excellence awards program acknowledges great achievements by institutions of higher education.
One of the judges, Michael Stoner, described on his blog how the entries were evaluated. Among the criteria on which the sites were judged were the following elements:
- sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search
- a clear identity that is appropriate to the organization
- an appropriate level of innovation (Designers pushed the envelope without diminishing the findability or readability of content.)
- standardization of interface across the site
We kept all these elements and more in mind as we worked with the Duke team to redesign Duke.edu, especially the standardization of interface across the site, which we took one step further with the brand bar concept we developed to extend that standardization to other sites under the Duke University umbrella.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the strategy, design, development, and content creation for Duke.edu. We're honored to be able to share this accomplishment with such a deserving group of people.
Last night at Refresh the Triangle, my co-worker and friend David Eisinger gave a revised version of a talk he gave at DevNation in Chicago a while back. He wrote an overview of the talk on our developer blog recently; it's a great topic. David spent one hour each day for 30 days learning a new technology. He kept a blog about it and did some hard thinking, not just about programming languages, but also motivation, determination, and success. He shared his thoughts last night and was kind enough to add a "NERD ALERT" badge to his slides when he transitioned from general wisdom to programming details.
David is hilarious and insightful, and even though I may have been the least technical person in the room, I loved the presentation. He left developers talking about the specific technologies he experimented with; he left designers talking about what they might tackle -- like 30 days of new fonts; and he left me talking about the general challenges of changing habits and trying out new things.
If you're in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and do anything related to the web, I encourage you to come out to the Refresh meetings. We meet on the fourth Thursday of each month. It doesn't matter what your particular expertise is. We do our best to find speakers and topics that raise new questions, reveal new ideas, inspire better work, and build stronger relationships. Last night was Refresh at its finest -- complete with beers and hilarity after the meeting.
(P.S. - We had the privilege of having our meeting in Rigsbee Hall last night. It's a beautiful, historic, accessible space in downtown Durham with awesome AV equipment. Whether you're planning a wedding or a professional conference, it's a sweet place to gather.)
Think back to your school days, when you were tasked with writing the longest research paper of your life. Chances are, you pulled an all-nighter before the deadline and miraculously cranked out an acceptable essay (double-spaced, of course). Looking back, do you think this was your finest work? Would you want the rest of the world to look at this hastily thrown-together effort as the ultimate representation of your abilities?
No, I didn't think so.
It surprises me how often companies take this "all-nighter" approach for their websites. They want their new site to do X, Y, and Z ... and they want it NOW. A website, like a research paper, isn't something that should be pieced together as quickly as possible without proper preparation. A research paper without research is often a disorganized jumble with no coherent vision or purpose; a website without strategy will reach the same fate.
This is where the 7 P's come in.
Continue reading "The 7 P’s of Web Projects … And 7 Reasons Why They Work"
Our work on Ficly was recognized as a Silver Medalist at the 61st Annual Show hosted by the Art Director's Club of Metropolitan Washington. We were honored to be among dozens of other amazing agencies in the Washington, DC area. The complete list of winning Viget entries includes:
Two of my awesome colleagues are making Viget proud by speaking at RailsConf next month. Web Developer Tony Pitale will present "User Behavior Tracking with Google Analytics, Garb, and Vanity." Tony will review some tricky Analytics scenarios, show how to get the data back from Google Analytics, and compare the data with A/B test information collected in Vanity. Tony told me he is "excited to share what's I've learned doing an Analytics project at Viget," and we're excited for him.
Development Director Clinton R. Nixon will present "Migrating Plugins and Gems to Rails 3." Clinton's talk is also based on some recent work done around the office and he, too, is looking forward to sharing his knowledge and experience. "Speaking at RailsConf is an honor and it will be fun share my growing excitement for Rails 3. I hope to share a helpful tip or two, as well. "
RailsConf is in Baltimore, MD, this year -- just a short ride from our HQ office in Falls Church, VA. I won't be attending, but a lot of our development team will be. Get in touch if you're in town for the conference and we should know you.
Congrats, Tony and Clinton!
One of the more productive uses of the iPad -- there aren't that many, after all -- is the ability to unobtrusively take notes. The device's small footprint makes it the ideal companion for carting around Viget to meetings, or quickly recording an idea, particularly for project managers like myself. And surprisingly, the onscreen keyboard is responsive enough to closely mimic typing on a physical one.
The iPad is a clear win, but the programs available for it with which to document your musings are a more complicated equation. After seven apps and four weeks of iPad ownership, I can't say that any of the options described below are perfect. Some are better than others, and it depends on your note-taking style (e.g., words versus pictures). These apps represent a small portion of those available in iTunes store, and I arranged them according to the ones I found least and most useful.
Continue reading "Note Taking on the iPad"
Loyal Viget followers already know about Pointless Corp. Loyal Pointless Corp followers already know about Connect-A-Sketch. What you might not know is that we've just made some new feature updates and lifted the invitation-only barrier from C-A-S, so the application is now open to the public!
We think C-A-S is better than ever. Nonetheless, use it at your own risk. It's a handy tool, but it's definitely alpha-ware, and we aren't making any promises that it will be bug-free.
Around this time a year ago, when client work was a bit ... eh ... light, instead of panicking we had a ton of fun putting our extra time into Pointless projects. We launched several in a short period of time, including SpeakerRate, FeedStitch, and HeyCraig! As luck would have it, for the last six months we've been cranking on client work (which we love!). We've had less time to conceive of and launch new Pointless Corp ideas, but we have been able to keep some of our favorite projects healthy. Tweets of Fury got a design refresh. SpeakerRate will get its own Product Manager Intern this summer. And now, Connect-A-Sketch is improved and public.
As Brian has written about before, it can be a challenge for a services company like Viget to keep the right dose of creative, internal projects going. So far in 2010, we feel really good about the balance we're striking. Let us know if you're using Connect-A-Sketch. We're excited to continue testing and polishing.
