In 1996, I was part of an eight-member committee whose task was to design the University of Cincinnati's corporate home pages.

These were to replace the existing pages which had been created by the site's system admin, and had.grown orgaincally.

Over the course of nearly a year, we came up with a design which began to give the university a unified appearance.

The principle design considerations were a need to create a look similar to the existing print material the university had developed, and a need to provide students, prospective students and staff with the ability to quickly navigate to the desired materials.

The large graphic at the top of the screen accomplished the first task of continuing the corporate look, while the table at the bottom provided quick access to important sites within the university.

My role was as HTML expert. I not only coded the final pages, but consulted in issues of image size, navigation and information design.

I was also part of the "April fools committee," whose self-defined task was to pull a prank on the university for this most-important holiday. Here too, I was the main coder for the project.

As an interesting (or maybe not) sidenote. Coincidentally, the university was the victim of a denial of service attack early in the morning of April 1. When OARNet discovered our prank, they thought we were not only being flooded with IP packets, but were hacked as well and called several contacts at 3 am. Needless to say, those contacted did not find our prank particulary funny.