Simplicity, Abstraction, and the Modern Website: 10 Years Later

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A little over a decade ago, I became the first full-time web developer for the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech and I was tasked with bringing them out of the wild west of the web and into the modern age of web design.  A year into that adventure, I did a presentation about the philosophy I had developed, which I have tried to keep at heart ever since.  Now that I am in my eleventh year with the college, I'm looking back on the past decade and seeing how well that philosophy has served me.  In this presentation, I go over the four facets of that philosophy, looking at how they applied in the past and how they still apply in the current day and age:

  • The Strategy of Abstraction-First Design
  • The Art of Simplistic and Intuitive Landing Pages
  • The Virtue of Documenting Your Website
  • The Joy of Streamlining Back End Systems