Last week Dan Boyarski popped his head into class, pointed to me, and told me to see him after class. So I did.

He wanted to know if I could help out with maintaining and updating the Emergence Conference website that the School of Design is hosting September 8???????10. Sure, I said. Even with the time I was spending photographing my classmates?????? homes last week, I could not pass up the opportunity to get involved.

The site and the conference are being put together by last year??????s students, who are currently scattered throughout the country at their respective internships. This makes communication and collaboration a challenge.

Essentially, Jim Brommer supplies me with content, and Susan Dybbs provides direction on where to put the content, and what technical changes to make.

One of my first tasks was to standardize all of the pages and strip them of tables (The horror! The horror!). There were three slightly different layouts that I combined into one Dreamweaver template. I rebuilt the style sheet and brought the site into web standard compliance, and then applied the template to all pages. This made Susan (and me) happy.

I also employed sIFR for the page headers in place of the images that were being used because it was annoying to create a new image for new pages.

Those changes have made the process of updating the content and adding new pages a lot easier. Where possible, I have also tweaked some of the content organization to work better on the web. Still, there are some problems with the information architecture. Also, I think a stronger IA plan from the start would have helped produce a stronger design.

Regardless, I??????m having fun showing off my web and CSS skills. I??????m not sure why, but I get a lot of pleasure converting a table-based design to CSS. And that, my friends, makes me a pretty big nerd in my book.