eFunds websites and intranet

When I moved from Deluxe Corporation to their sister company, eFunds, I was assigned to "beautify" and "jazz up" their existing websites and applications. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with their gold, purple, and fluorescent color palette. *sigh*

eFunds was my first exposure to a Content Management System. Unfortunately, that CMS was IBM's terrible database product, Lotus Notes Domino. It was a terribly inflexible program, based on a less-than-standard database system, and it drove me nuts. They used it for everything, from their intranet to their corporate website.

Later, the powers that be were finally convinced that Lotus Notes was a poor choice, and a new CMS was purchased: Stellant Xpedio. This would have worked grand, out-of-the-box. However, our company decided to only purchase one back-end component of Xpedio, and save money by building our own front-end interface for it. And by save money, they meant farming the work out to India.

Sadly, they also hired an ad agency to come up with a new design for this site, which was static, and boring. They said it could never be a liquid layout. Pffft! I took apart their design, and rebuilt the HTML into a liquid layout within a day. They were astounded. So was my boss. Unfortunately, this achievement was not enough to save my job when the economy crashed following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.