Creative Services Intranet

When I joined the Advisory Board Creative Services department, it wasn't long before they discovered my skills in web design. They had been working on a departmental Intranet site for quite a long time, and I stepped up to help make it a reality.

What they required was a web site that department members could log into, view a calendar of events, log the hours they were working for the day and on which projects, access a message board system, and access documentation to the department's programs and procedures.

The team that was formed consisted of several managers, several designers, myself as the web expert and another fellow as the database expert. I did the research on which languages we should use, then began learning how to make the the site and the database talk to each other. I worked with various members of the department to discuss the tools that we'd be building in and the functuality of each one, worked with the database guru to pick up the basics of Access and SQL and to make real the tools that had been requested, and spent hours developing the UI and the bells and whistles on the back end. Some parts, such as the message boards and the department calendar, started life as pre-existing components and were modified to meet our needs. Others, like the QuickLog time entry system, were built from scratch. Tying them all together in one very robust yet still cohesive package was a terrific project.

The CS Intranet was built using Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator, Dreamweaver UltraDev, HTML, JavaScript, Microsoft Access and both ColdFusion and ASP at different stages of its development.