GreatLakesWetlands.ca Website

The first major website I designed was originally called WIRE Net (Wetland Indicators and Research Education Network). It now lives at greatlakeswetlands.ca, a more sensible name.

Because I was just starting out, I wanted to try all sorts of crazy graphic effects and CSS trickery. But this website is for an academic / agency audience, people who are used to scanning Word documents all day, and don’t expect much else from their websites (at least, that’s what I assume from browsing the agency sites).

I think it was very fortunate that I was forced to tone down my approach. I ended up focusing much more closely on the information structure, and figuring out how best to automate the massive amounts of information. That’s because this site was also built in the days before I knew what a Content Management System was. I knew how to use XHTML and CSS to handcraft sites. But there was just way too much information here to be coding each page from scratch.

So I learned a little bit of PHP, enough to build some templates and to use variables to control the output. Now, with WordPress or Drupal this job would be much easier and faster. But since there’s no database, this site feels like it runs nice and fast.