I was hired on at Intel as a contractor, specifically to head up the redesign of their Intel Research website, as it was then called, for a mid-March launch date. This was to take 3 months, taking up the duration of my contract. During the first two weeks, I had to undergo more than just the usual meetings with coworkers and management, however.

Intel Corporation has its own proprietary content management software for external websites. This program, called DocFactory, provides version control and allows publishers to keep notes with each version, which is useful in a multi-user project. Another program to learn was eRoom, currently published by the Documentum company. Then beyond the programs to learn were all of the legal guidelines that have to be known by heart by every web publisher in the entire company. This all took the form of classes, with an actual final exam.

After the schooling process was over, I had only ten weeks in which to complete the project!

Intel's externally-facing websites all follow a standard format. They all have to include a standard header & footer, which are both SSI (server-side-includes) files. Then there is a lefthand navigation bar to navigate within each "channel", in this case the Intel Research website. There are other standards for typography, and the use of color. Mostly, Intel is concerned with creating a modern, progressive look to their website, as well as integrating visual elements that relate to their products, such as the circuitboard-like lines that are used in different areas.

Most people would look at these guidelines and think, "Oh, thats simple!" But, that isn't so at all. Just using the wrong thickness of line or a slightly-too-large headline, and the look of a page is ruined as far as keeping with the look of other Intel Corporation websites. It can be quite hard to keep within these guidelines, while at the same time satisfying the customer's wishes to make their site stand out from others. Then there are the multitude of available templates, sometimes nearly a dozen for each level in a site (channel landing page, subsection landing page, content page, subcontent page).

Another element that made this redesign difficult was the variety of personalities within the Research at Intel community, as it was renamed at the start of 2003. Each section, such as Microprocessors, Silicon, Global Manufacturing, all are headed up by different content owners. Most importantly, each have their own needs and tastes; a template that might satisfy the head of Microprocessors for their subsection's homepage might not always satisfy the head of Exploratory Research for their own landing page.

Almost every single page on Intel Corporation's entire website community includes imagery alongside the typographic headline of the page. These images are supposed to be realistic photographs, portraying either a literal product (such as a computer processor), or an interpretation of a concept (students using Intel-powered laptops in a library).

Unfortunately, Intel's own library of photographs was pretty limited & scarce. With the project manager's approval and some limited guidance from the content owners on what they wanted to see, I went to Getty Images, and found many, many photographs (nearly 80), enough for ten choices per subsection. Many of these were very striking, and extremely beautiful, such as the images shown on the Intel Research main homepage. Again, unfortunately, most of the content owners struck down those ideas for various reasons: too vague in concept, not immediately identifiable as an Intel product, and similar comments. I understood their concerns and worked within the boundaries they then set after seeing my first drafts, eventually coming to the choices as seen on the website today.

I also worked well under the budgetary expectations for how much photography might cost, saving the project many thousands of dollars. I did this by choosing only Royalty-Free images, so that the Intel Research team did not have to purchase rights for each image used on the site. This had other benefits, such as Intel Corporation as a whole being able to re-use those photographs on other sites and in print. The project manager was then able to use this surplus to bring in an application developer for a site-specific Search function, which was not in the original scope of the project because of initial budget forecasts. This function is still in the process of being developed at this time, but will soon be extremely useful to researchers looking for information in their fields of study.

I'm very pleased with the feedback I've received from this project, having read many emails such as the three to the right. Internally, Intel Corporation works like a series of small businesses doing contract work with each other. They have a feedback apparatus in place for internal customers to give departments such as mine a rating. I received the highest rating possible for my work on Intel Research.

Based on my performance throughout the Intel Research project, and feedback such as those examples, Intel Corporation saw fit to extend my contract from 3 months to an entire year.

Please take a look at the Research at Intel website's new redesign at: www.intel.com/research.