Alice Carter (left) and Michelle Cameron of Interactive Media Associates. (Photo by Michael Jones)

OK, no sweat. After all, I’d been part of the team that had created New York Today, an elaborate online city guide for The New York Times, in 1998. Much of the text for the new Juilliard site was already written, I was told, and some of the design work was already underway. This should go relatively smoothly, I told myself.

Upon my arrival, I encountered my first obstacle: my office space in the Publications Office was… well, let’s just say a bit cramped. It’s only temporary, I was promised, until a better space can be found. (It’s only temporary, I repeated to myself, mantra-style.)

After I met the staff and settled in, it was time to get to work. First task: Break the project down into its key elements—editorial, design, technical—and identify the critical components of each; do an inventory of the missing components; come up with a working development schedule.

Enter Michelle Cameron, vice president and creative director of Interactive Media Associates (IMA), the company that spearheaded the site’s redesign and is now its host. Michelle and I drew up a schedule, with early June as our target launch date, and outlined critical junctures along the way. That would give us three months to pull it all together. (Plenty of time, I tried hard to convince myself.)

Before designing the home page and inner pages, we needed to finalize the site navigation. It had to be simple to use, yet reflect Juilliard’s multi-faceted personality. How many sections should there be? What terms should go in them? In what order should they be presented?

Such decisions needed consensus among some other staff members. But just try getting Mary Gray, Karen Wagner, Lynne Rutkin, and Janet Kessin together for a series of meetings at the same time that auditions are being held, the college catalog is being updated, and the Development Office is planning one major event after another. It wasn’t easy, but we coordinated schedules and debated the hot issues: Should Admissions have its own section, or information about it be interspersed in sections about the School’s various divisions? (We decided on the former.) Should MAP be coupled with Pre-College? (No.) And so on… Each question raised several more, and everyone had an opinion, often conflicting. This didn’t make things easy for IMA.

“We were careful not to allow ourselves a knee-jerk reaction to every comment we received,” Michelle said, “but rather weighed them against the bigger-picture objectives. We were equally careful to listen carefully, and to make sure we were not letting the schedule drive the process.”

While the great navigation debate ensued, I was taking stock of copy, and found that more text than I had hoped either needed rewriting or was missing entirely. I contacted staff members responsible for providing text for specific sections and assigned deadlines to allow time for editing, leaning hard on those who missed them. (I was called a nudge, a nag, and even a slave driver. (Me? A nudge? )

Meanwhile, other elements were also missing. Photos, for example. Jane Rubinsky, senior editor of Publications, stared at me as if I were from outer space when I asked on which servers photos were stored. Similarly, when I needed to select music clips for the home page, I asked the Recording Department Director Robert Taibbi if I could search his database of recorded concerts. He pointed me to a cabinet with rows of books, organized by year, each full of typewritten concert information. (A database for these records is in the planning stages, he said.)

In April, the better work space I was promised in March materialized: the former Production Department offices on the second floor—a huge space with commanding views of Lincoln Center—which I would have to myself until the designated offices for Publications on the fourth floor were ready. So sandwiched between endless meetings, hunting down photos, and nagging for copy, I had to pack and move. (It’s only temporary, echoed the mantra.)

The navigation and design of the home page were finalized, winning President Joseph Polisi’s stamp of approval. We decided to create President Polisi’s welcome message as a Flash movie, a project that posed technical and design challenges of its own. Slowly but surely the copy came in. As quickly as Michelle could populate pages with text, I would send her corrected markups. We tied up many a fax machine.

With only a few weeks to go, several key programming elements remained incomplete. In particular, the faculty search was not ready. To the rescue came Alice Carter, IMA’s project management director, who coordinated the creation of the faculty database.

“A few days before launch, Ira called to tell me that he had entered Gyorgy Sandor into the search boxes as a test, only to be informed that there was no faculty member with that name,” Alice said. “This was because the database was looking for György Sándor, not Gyorgy Sandor.

“An easy workaround would have been to simply take all of the accents out of people’s names, but that seemed a shame, given the international character of Juilliard’s faculty. Instead, we added lookup fields to the database that would allow users to enter non-accented and non-extended character text in the search boxes that would match faculty members’ correctly spelled names. So thanks to György Sándor, the online faculty search also finds Andrè Emelianoff, Denise Massè, and Warren Vachè, among others.”

And so, on June 20, just a couple of weeks off the original launch date, with not much fanfare—no fireworks, no drum rolls—the new www.juilliard.edu made its debut on the World Wide Web. The very next day, I moved into yet another office, Room 465. (It’s not temporary.)

And now? There’s no rest for the weary, as the saying goes. Gil Hennessey of Juilliard’s I.T. Department, Alice Carter, and I are madly working on a searchable calendar of events. An online version of this newspaper is being designed (if you’re reading this on the Web, then you know we made the deadline). Discussions for live Webcasts of Juilliard performances are underway. A Webmaster’s work is never done…