DaveNet: Monday, November 17, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Jeff Veen on the WebMonkey Redesign

Jeff Veen, jeff@wired.com , is the interface director for Wired Digital, the company that produces the WebMonkey site. He has a personal website.

Jeff Veen on the WebMonkey Redesign

I appreciate your comments on the new Webmonkey, Dave. It was a labor of love for the last couple months, and we're all very proud of the new face and guts of our site.

You pointed out a couple of interesting things that deserve discussion (which, as you can imagine, we've been discussing and debating and arguing about for weeks).

The image of the switch is a visual pun, playing off the headline ("It's Alive"). Now that you mention it, I suppose there could be a bit of confusion for our audience, since the image could be mistaken for an interface element. We'll be illustrating our top stories in that space, and these images will change regularly. Besides, who would want to turn Webmonkey off!

The navigation system on the new Monkey was probably the one thing we've struggled with the most, and is something that will be evolving quickly in the coming weeks. We knew we wanted to embrace dynamic HTML with this redesign, and we knew we didn't want to simply make headlines fly around. So we reached for a new navigation paradigm -- an unobtrusive, collapsible tool inspired by IE4's explorer bars. It's a system we'd like to see run through the entire site, both for its utility as well as for consistency. But we're on new ground here, and usability must win out over pure innovation. Like I said, we'll be evolving.

Finally, our backend system is something that I'd love to talk more about in the professional Web site development community. We debated the pros and cons of most of the leading content management systems: Frontier, Vignette, Edition. We finally decided on using Apache's XSSI module with a custom template system for a number of reasons. First, it doesn't impose any new workflow constraints on us at all. In fact, since our source remains simple HTML text files in the file system, we made no compromises on how we produced Webmonkey on a daily basis. Using XSSI variables and templates also works live -- we can change templates on the server and the whole site instantly updates, rather than having to republish all the files every time we tweak the site. And the final deciding factor was speed: XSSI is blindingly fast, especially when you using Apache's caching.

The downside to all of this is that we still have to hack around without tools. Webmonkey is still built largely in BBEdit and vi. Laying a workflow system on top of all of this is one of our next big goals -- email and a file system just don't cut it.

Webmonkey, I think, should be the testbed for new Web publishing ideas, both editorially and in how we build the site. This redesign has shown just how much fun they both can be.

Thanks again for taking the time to dig through our new home, Dave.