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QI News & Tips You Can Use

August 1, 2008

Back after a long delay

It has been quite a while since our last newsletter, almost a full year. We’ve been busy during that time. In this issue, for our designer friends, we have some tricks and techniques for setting up graphics and design files to hand off to web developers. We also have a short PDF guide on the topic.

Also inside… Learn how we helped Wired move their howto.wired.com website to Media Wiki (the same system used by WikiPedia). And find out how BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is using Omniture Publish to manage their new website.

Thanks, as always!

~ Phil Quinn

QI helps migrate Wired.com's HowTo Wiki to MediaWiki

Wired's howto.wired.com website

Wired.com, the online companion to Wired Magazine, is one of CondéNet’s lifestyle web sites bringing the editorial excellence of CondéNast magazines to digital media. Wired Magazine, founded in 1993 and published in San Francisco, California, reports on the impact of technologies on culture, the economy and politics.

Wired.com had a mission-critical deadline for migrating their "Wired How-To Wiki" to MediaWiki, the same open-source system used by the Wikipedia. To meet Wired’s deadline, they needed to outsource the front-end programming portion of the project because their internal resources were overloaded. The work required a pixel-perfect implementation of Wired’s designs into a set of MediaWiki templates or “skin.” In addition, advertising, analytics, and several MediaWiki extensions needed to be integrated into the standard MediaWiki software.

Read the full case-study

New website design for www.quinn.com

quinn.com homepage

After far too long, we have finally updated the look and feel of our website. We’ve also added some cool new features like an all-HTML animated feature on the home page, improved lightbox effects for design samples, better print version support, and many behind-the-scenes improvements.

The new site uses valid XHTML, the jQuery javascript library, Dirk Jesse's YAML CSS framework, Michael J. I. Jackson’s shadowbox, and Omniture Publish and Site Search.

We’d love to know what you think of the new design. You can send us feedback on our contact page.