After a ton of work, and quite a long time (try 7 years), the Walker Art Center has finally redesigned their site. I only meantion it of course since I was one of the people working on it. Obviously I've only been at the Walker for a year and a half, so I don't know what they were doing those other 6 or so years, but some how we've managed to do what no one else could, we completely redesigned the thing from the ground up in the last year, and made it work.

For my part I did the navigation, the Walker Channel, and Expansion site (the last one has actually been online a year now). Most of my other time recently has been put to task on our internal admin system, which kicks major ass, but unfortunatly, other than probably a dozen people, nobody will be able to see it.

The site as it stands is not done. We needed to get something new up since the Walker is closed for a year (for expansion) and the website is serving as one of the many gateways to the Walker. Thus most of the sections on the site take you to the new Calendar for now, and some of the site sections are still the old crappy version. Over the course of the next year new "neighborhoods" will be created with unique look and feels for many of these sections.

Perhaps this doesn't seem like a big deal, but internally for us, it is. The simple fact that after numerous tries this is the first real new site the Walker has had in almost 7 years (for various reasons), the fact that it's all dynamic (a first for Walker believe it or not), the fact that is uses all open source tools, and the fact that it attempts to use something a little more recent than HTML 2.0, make this pretty special. For a staff of four, we think it's a pretty big deal, even if there are quite a few bugs we still need to take care of. ;) Have fun, and search around.