This was a whirlwind of a project. We usually set aside at least two months for a project – this one took just two weeks from start to finish. While this may sound like plenty of time to build a website, it’s surprising how little time it really is. In this case, that’s a big part of what made it so fun. A slight bit weary eyed, inspired every inch of the way by Jessica’s whit and charm, we’ve given birth to a tiny masterpiece. (Look, no Flash!)

We didn’t have long to build the site, so we decided to use the simplest thing that works for content management. And that means our Ladybug updating software, a dead-simple way to let our clients manage their content. It was a perfect fit!

Have we mentioned that we were under such a time crunch? We made some firm technical decisions from the outset and build the site with them firmly in mind. For instance, we wanted to incorporate Flash-like effects such as a fading menu, scroll bars that don’t look ugly in the middle of the page, and a fixed size layout. Rather than write this code from scratch, we decided to use the jQuery JavaScript library. This was a key decision and a great fit for a website of this size! We would highly recommend it, and will certainly be using it again soon. We also used the Yahoo User Interface Library’s simple CSS framework, great for starting a site with a clean slate.

So we’re very happy. It was a fun project and a great client to work with. Our appreciation also goes out to Angelica Hesse for daring to illustrate along with us.

Want to hear more? Listen to Jessica Queller’s interview on NPR’s Morning Edition.