Tackling a Website Redesign

On April 16, 2019 I did my first ever conference talk at PBS TechCon in Las Vegas. I was super nervous to do so, but I made it out alive and I've been meaning (for months!) to talk about that experience and link to my slides.

I've played music on stage in front of crowds many, many times and am mostly used to that, but public speaking was (and still is) totally new and terrifying to me, especially when the topic is web development. As of writing this blog post, I'm about 3 years into my coding career (this time in 2016 I was in the middle of my coding bootcamp). While I've learned a lot in that time, I don't feel qualified to be the one behind the podium. That said, I think it's important that I push myself beyond that imposter syndrome, and I've been doing a lot of stuff to make that push: taking a deep dive into the fundamentals of JavaScript, starting and (finally getting around to) maintaining this blog, and speaking at a conference.

For my proposal, I wanted to give a talk on CSS Grid. It's a tool that I had just heavily used across the klru.org site, and I've found it to be just delightful to work with. The conference organizers thought that it might be better if I do a presentation on Tackling a Website Redesign. I would be co-presenting with Sukee Bennett, Audience Engagement Editor at NOVA (the big PBS science show produced by WGBH), who had also just completed a website redesign for their show. The thought behind this arrangement was that I could discuss undertaking a website redesign from the perspective of a web developer at a local PBS station, and Sukee would come from the standpoint of doing the same thing at a PBS national production. We were connected by a conference talk producer, Tara Vaezi (Senior Program Manager, PBS Digital), who helped us workshop our respective presentations, combined our slides, and moderated/did housekeeping for the room on presentation day. Both of these women are badasses and were great folks to work with on something that was otherwise terrifying to me. Many thanks are also in order to various staff at KLRU, a few friends, my Digital Immersion Project mentor Tabitha Safdi (Digital Media Manager - Producer, SCETV), because they were also captive audiences for me to practice my presentation on.

And lastly I have to give a huge shout out and thank my awesome partner, Tessa, who helped me workshop my presentation from the beginning. She helped me take it from a very rough outline to something much more polished and organized. She not only heard me practice it dozens of times and gave me pointers, she also took care of the visual aspect of the slides (I am so bad at Powerpoint). She really was a life saver.

My slides are linked below. For the actual content of my presentation, I went with a mix of personal experience undertaking the redesign of KLRU.org and general terminology and concepts of modern web development on legacy products, culminating in a list of lessons learned along the way, and things that I wished that I had known going into such a major project. Typing out my entire talk would be kind of absurd, but here are some concepts and terminology that it touches upon, and resources are linked to much of it at the end of the deck:

• Determining whether you need to redesign your site
• What the scope of work might look like for a site redesign
• Technical Debt
• KLRU's redesign - where we came from, where we went, and the timeline between the two
• Website launch considerations
• Planning for the future of your website with an MRO framework.

I invite you to take a look at the slides, follow links to resources, and get in touch with me if you want me to talk about anythig in detail.

Tackling a Website Redesign Slides

Google Slides available here.

Powerpoint available here. (No idea how these will look)

PDF available here.