Arts Tasmania, smARTmap, DHHS

Over the last couple of months, three new websites for Tasmanian government departments have launched, for which I developed the frontend. Two of them were projects for Arts Tasmania, while the other one was the new website for the Department of Health and Human Services.

For the new Arts Tasmania website, I developed the page templates and several custom Javascript widgets, such as the top navigation, slideshow and the image slider at the bottom of the homepage.

Also for Arts Tasmania was the smART map project, a catalogue of arts destinations in Tasmania, realised as a Google Maps overlay. I developed nearly all the frontend work, including the page templates, the sliders on the homepage, the expanding search form with custom checkboxes, and parts of the Google Maps integration.

The third project was the new website for the Department of Health and Human Services. I provided various page templates and developed the large custom drop-down menu and content sliders.

What all three projects had in common, was a questionable division of development work between one external supplier who provided the frontend development — the company I used to work for at that time — while another external supplier did backend integration. Whatever the reasons for this decision may have been, it has led to low-quality results due to poor backend integration of the frontend work I supplied. All three websites still suffered from embarrassing stuff-ups and styling issues at the time of writing.