Greg Walsh

 

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My Old Projects: Smithsonian Dinosaur Site

Tuesday October 04, 2005

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I had a random thought today to start looking at old projects I've worked on and link to them. This site was for the Smithsonian Institute - National Museum of Natural History's new dinosaur exhibit and was created by a former employer. It was awesome to work on a web site for a great institution and will be seen by people from around the world.

The unfortunate thing was how mismanaged this project was. Because we were trying to get our foot in the door, the project was WAY underpriced and was always low on the priority list. This means that it stayed in the prototype stage until the client called the PM too many times angry that we weren't done. We wanted to work on it (who wouldn't want to work with Dinosaurs??), but, management had so many other things for us to do to keep cash flow moving, we weren't able to.

I took the exisiting proto-screen designs and chopped them up to make the pages. ALL the pages. Lots and lots of pages. Then I used Flash and the prototypes to make two of the interactives in the, um, Interactives section.

I was laid off shortly after that and it took about a year for the site to go live. I know they were waiting on the Virtual Tour section because of the client's changing-of-the-minds. I think some of the Virtual Dig got tweaked too...I really don't remember.

In the end, it's a pretty cool project that lots of people will see for sometime.

Pros: Internationally know client, fun e-learning interactives to build

Cons: Foot-in-the-door mentality/low internal business need priority made execution extremely difficult.

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