dummied

Fork in the road

At a glance

This entry was written on April 7, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled The importance of why.

The entry following this is entitled The Open's opening.

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This entry has been tagged as Newspapers, Work.

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I guess I'll need to update the bio ... and probably this whole website was well.

After a month-plus worth of interviewing, I'm going to be moving full-time into the realm of newspaper web design after accepting a position in the web department of my current newspaper.

I was actually interviewing for an online production manager position, but given my lack of knowledge in the CMS my company uses (Publicus), I knew that was kind of a long shot all along.

The web site I'm going to be working on is LoHud.com, the online home of The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y. (Until now, I had taken great pains to keep my newspaper name out of this weblog ... but I figure this blog's already been passed around a few folks at corporate at this point). As you can see, the newspaper's web site needs a lot of work (code, design and functionality), but I'm excited about it.

I'm also excited about some theoretical projects coming down the pike that I hope I'll be able to talk about down the line.

While I didn't get the management position, or even show this to anyone I interviewed with, I put together a massive web page with a lot of my site goals and plans. I never fully cross-browser-ized it, so it looks a little funky in IE (6.0 ... I shudder to think what it might look like in 5.0 or 5.5 or even 5.2 on the Mac) and even Firefox but looks spiffy in Safari.

The reason it didn't come up in my interviews? I don't know, actually. I think I realized at some point that I don't yet know all the logistical concerns involved. A lot of that page reads as extremely arrogant and naive in light of a lot of things about the site I know now and expect to find out in the coming weeks and months. The document did come in handy though as far as figuring out what to discuss in my interviews — as a result, I was rarely left without an answer.

It also has a couple of design features I've grown quite fond of — like the hover "BACK TO TOP" message on the headers and the print style sheet (seriously ... print the thing out ... I think it looks better than the page itself).

My days off and hours will be changing, and hopefully now that all the interviewing's over, I'll be back to updating here more frequently.

Sorry for the short entry, but I'll have something more lengthy shortly ... if only to fill out this column.