Hi everyone, my name is Jeff Parker and I developed the backend for the Aplus.net website. I thought I would share some thoughts and experiences as this may help those of you working to develop your own online presence.

Our goal was to develop a standards-compliant XHTML/CSS site that incorporates as many best practices as possible. This included testing compatibility with various browsers, implementing unobtrusive javascript (when possible) and ensuring we have friendly, descriptive URL’s. Like many of you, we had a very tight time schedule and wanted to deploy the most effective site we could in this timeframe.

Our work began by first building an affinity diagram of our old site to see exactly where we were at. We did this with two goals in mind:

1. Find how many clicks it takes to get to content
2. Discover extraneous pages

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