Opportunity Knocks is an internal training newsletter that provides information about training opportunities, tips, and information about community involvement. Originally this letter was designed in MS Publisher, and emailed to employees as a PDF. This, however, meant that it could not be easily searched and that people often did not read it. The newsletter would go out every two to three months and took nearly a week to assemble. In 2009, I reviewed some of the previous newsletters, and … [Read more...]
posted on July 3, 2013 by
Optimizing Your Internal Websites to Boost Productivity
A lot of people will talk about how important it is for your website to be fast, especially for websites that face your customers. But what about internal websites for your employees. Could a faster website boost productivity? Their productivity is a cost that you may want to optimize. Now several studies have shown that even a few tenths of a second affect the user's perspective on a website, and how likely they are to want to use it. But I've heard several owners say how they are not as … [Read more...]
posted on July 2, 2013 by
Customer Training @ SunGard Public Sector
I took over the Training & Development websites for SunGard Public Sector in 2007. I was tasked with redesigning the interface and managing the training system. This legacy application is written in ASP Classic and connects to a SQL Server 2008 database. The database was updated from SQL Server 2000 when I started on the project. I found several defects in the system that was purchased, and started redesigning core components over the next several years. This included redesigning the … [Read more...]
posted on June 23, 2013 by
South Florida Putting Greens
I took over this site several years ago. It was originally designed by another company, however, the site was taking a long time to load, and did not provide for an easy way for customers to contact the company. I initially redesigned the layout of the website, shaving off almost a megabyte of download per page by optimizing the navigation structure. This was done using CSS Sprites, and removing table based layouts. This produced a faster downloading site, that appeared quicker to the end … [Read more...]