Design of Web site and content management system
Dec 1997

Voted Best UK Site of 1998, This Is London is an interactive city guide from the London Evening Standard. The breadth and depth of information it contains is staggering: real-time news, sports scores and financial information, reviews of films and plays linked to cinemas with maps and online booking, restaurant reviews (again with maps), 3D panoramic walkthroughs of art galleries and major tourist attractions, interactive gadgets like contests, polls and a daily crossword puzzle, and much more.

Organizing that much information into a simple interface -- let alone coding it all -- was a major challenge and I was the sole designer on most of the project. Yet we shipped the site less than six months after I arrived.

This Is London is an entirely dynamic site, served out of a complex Oracle database. During the the initial build, a team of five database programmers were applied full-time to its development. As the site designer, I was in constant contact with the programmers, solving technical and interface problems with both the site and its back-end systems, and creating all of the master template code and graphics myself.

This Is London was named Best Consumer Publishing Product and Best UK Site of 1998 by New Media Age magazine and Yell, two respected British Web awards bodies.

www.thisislondon.com
(The site has since been significantly redesigned.)