Taking our cues from the popularity of magazines like Maxim and Jane, we restyled the site as a lifestyle magazine by and for students. The hard news was scrapped in favor of softer stories with a broader appeal. New sections focused on health, fashion, dorm living, and sex. The latter, in particular, was carefully crafted to provide provocative but not vulgar content appropriate for our target age group.

The visual design grew out of the editorial repositioning. The look was hip and lively, with main pages designed to showcase a vast amount of content without overwhelming the navigation. We also added a number of interactive features — like polls, discussions, member reviews, and the OnCampus directory (see User Interface) — that built a community and inspired a sense of ownership amongst our regular readers.

I designed the overall look-and-feel and led the art department in the creation of numerous templates, story graphics, and interactive features. I also worked closely with the production team on the implementation of the designs. On the editorial side, I developed the new editorial framework and hired the editors and writers needed to bring it to fruition. I then oversaw the editorial staff as they produced a library of content prior to the relaunch and daily additions afterward.

Actually, it proved to be a very fertile ground for experimentation. Many of the techniques developed for Tweak stories found their way into client work later on, and many clients came our way based on what they saw in Tweak.

Although Tweak is still online, it hasn't been updated in years. So please keep this in mind: although many of the techniques used would be quite simple to do now, it was rather envelope-pushing for its time. Also, stuff that looked great on the browsers of the day (Netscape 3 and 4) might not render perfectly with modern software. But all in all, I think the design holds up quite well. Many people even think it's still actively produced.

For starters, it's the first PHP-driven site I built alone. Although I'd been working around PHP for years, there were always expert programmers doing the heavy lifting. This time, I coded the templates myself and learned several techniques that I've used on almost everything I've done since.

Also, this site marks a turning point in my HTML coding style. Previously, I was of the "use whatever kludgery it takes to make HTML do what you want it to" school of thought. That meant using complex table structures for positional layout, spacer GIFs and other hacks to force things to stay put, all sorts of browser-specific code, and worse. For this project, I set out to do it all with proper CSS positioning and other standards-based methods. That meant I had to put a browser check in when my relatives with old browsers complained they couldn't read anything, but otherwise it worked pretty well.

Finally, I tried to design the site to work equally well on wireless devices as it did on full-size monitors. For that, I relied on the CSS "media" attribute, which I discovered is not ready for primetime. So I was only moderately successful with that particular goal, but I learned that coding for wireless delivery is going to make coding during the browser wars of the late '90s seem like child's play.