Skylar Design Develops Core Templates for NY Newsday
Melville, NY, SEP. 29 - In July 2005, Tribune Interactive contacted Skylar Design in search of support for a redesign of amny.com (formerly known as NYNewsday.com), a news web site that receives more than one million hits per month. The launch date for the project was set for mid-October. New designs had already been created by the site's graphics department but assistance was needed in developing core code which would then be integrated into other pre-existing applications.
The redesign team set several goals for the project. First, pages needed to be web compliant and file size kept to a minimum to minimize download time. Second, the project had to be completed in a timely manner in order to make deadline. Particularly at issue was the size of the home page, which regularly weighed more than the 255K standard set by Tribune Interactive.
"It was essential that we drop the size of the page," said Amanda Barrett, senior manager of amny.com and the point person for the redesign. "Nearly every week, our site's page weight was at least 260K. Once, it was more than 300K. That had to stop because it was hurting our download time."
With a more streamlined code than had previously been used for the site, Skylar was more than ready to handle the page weight issue.
After meeting with the redesign team and gaining a better understanding of its existing website, how its visitors use amny.com, and the direction the site needed to move with the redesign, Skylar began developing the core templates. From the beginning, Skylar patiently and skillfully thought through how it would approach each template to not only give life to the design but also keep the file size of each page as low as possible. Using CSS-table technology allowed us to control the various page elements, almost matching exactly what the Newsday designers conceived with their original interfaces.
"Justin Agoglia was exactly the kind of designer we needed for this project. Not only did he understand the code, but he saw what we were trying to achieve right from the beginning," said Barrett. "He listened to our needs, made changes when necessary and communicated in a friendly, intelligent manner."
After thorough testing and careful review of each template within current web browsers, Skylar was able to complete the project ahead of schedule. In addition, we achieved our goal of developing low bandwidth pages. After removing banner ads and other elements that were not part of the measuring standard, we decreased the file size by almost half of the measure of the existing templates.
"The process went much better than I had expected," said Barrett. "I thought it would be hard bringing in another team, but Skylar made it so easy. The work was thorough and the collaboration was fantastic. It was nice to work with Justin. He communicated like a human being, not just a computer guy."
"And the best part was the page weight. Now, we can get off the 'bad' list," said Barrett.
We appreciate New York Newsday entrusting Skylar Design with the task of such a critical project.