Washington Mutual

Employment: five years
Team: Online Banking/e-commerce
Summary: UI developer, implementing three generations of public site and online banking interfaces. static to CMS migration (Microsoft CMS) and web-standards conversion of user interfaces.

details

joining the Online Banking team in the fall of 2002, i quickly identified that the bank’s development standards still used deprecated techniques like table layout, spacer images, and inline styles.  across all online banking properties, as many as eight different disparate stylesheets were being used. print stylesheets were non-existent. sites were not ADA/section 508/WCAG compliant.

i led the effort to analyze the accessibility of our websites and provide recommendations to bring all WaMu sites into compliance. leveraging this awareness, i championed the use of semantic layout and CSS for all visual presentation. through subsequent releases, we:

• created a print stylesheet and eliminated custom server code to create “print versions” of pages
• removed all inline styles, spacer images, and tables used for layout
• merged all stylesheets to one common set of screen/print CSS
• (personally) reorganized CSS by scope and specificity, eliminating thousands of lines of code
• versioned CSS to match the design revision/nomenclature used by the design & marketing departments
• made core website functionality accessible to all users, regardless of browser capacities
• implemented gzip and data reduction
• optimized script loading and file includes which resulted in WaMu advancing to #1 Gomez.com ranking for speed

i left WaMu in August of 2007 when my wife and i moved back to New Hampshire for family reasons.