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Learn & Earn Program (1998)

Product Training Site for the Apple Sales Channel
aka "Building the Plane in Mid-Air."*

This was the Learn & Earn site approximately a year after the project started. I was hired as an HTML Editor soon after it launched in Fall 1997. The entire site was hand-coded in BBEdit.

Within a few months a parallel site for the Apple Sales and Marketing employees was added (the curse blessing of Steve Jobs liking your project), and I was made web master for the project. I still hand-coded a lot of HTML, but I had a new HTML Editor to assist with the rapidly-growing workload.

The fast pace of new product announcements (this was the dawn of the iMac) and new product courses made being a Jane-of-all-trades necessary, so I got my hands dirty with production graphics, copy editing, and the logistics of getting everything online. As fun as that was, I was relieved when actual people were hired to take over full-time what I was trying to do with a fraction of my time.

This is a specific example of an early Learn & Earn course. As web master, and then Content Production Manager, my job was to make sure that every course, no matter how large or complex, went online complete and in a timely fashion. Frequently, information would not be available on a new product until just a few hours (or even a few minutes) before a course was to go online.

Even in those relatively early days of the web, usability was very important to this project. As we worked on the next generation of the site, while still maintaining the break-neck pace of the current one, the user experience was considered every step of the way.

*This was my manager's favorite (and very accurate) way to describe the nature of this project.


filed under: 1998 | Apple Computer | Web Sites