Gateway
Support Website
As a contractor at Gateway for six months in late 2003, my main task was the continual updating of their support web site, including several major rollouts involving long hours coordinating with the stellar folks at their main facility in South Dakota. The website updates meant developing a million site mockups in Photoshop, then tons of hand-coding in HTML, XML & XSLT, CSS, ASP and JavaScript. Endlessly tweaking the interface to make it as clean and simple as possible. It was a dramatic lesson in simple usabilit. Creative flourishes were summarily vetoed. Eventually Gateway moved out of its facility in San Diego in favor of it current Orange County location and let go of a huge chunk of its contractors, myself and the group of people I worked with included. Even though I enjoyed working at Gateway I was much happier working on freelance projects in my home office. In six months all I have to show is this rather conservative design on the right, which is exactly what they wanted.
In the four years since I was there the Gateway Support site has been re-designed, but the basic structural design and layout ideas I developed are still in place, as is much of my dynamic code. I suppose I can count that as a success. High-volume websites are often re-designed on a yearly basis.
GATEWAY SUPPORT SITE
This is my early design for Gateway. When I left it looked about like this. The famous cowbox had been put aside while the company tried business-style branding and shed its consumer image.
And this is how is looks at the time of this writing. You can see the main layout and design elements are still there, but they've brought back the cowbox and brought the focus back on computer products instead of on broad consumer electronics categories.