webbies hanging out
The AWIA Mixed Grill was a cheeky, informal event series run by the Australian Web Industry Association back in the day, designed to bring together web professionals from across disciplines for casual networking, idea-sharing, and a bit of irreverent fun. It wasn't a conference or a workshop, it was more like a community cook-up for the digital crowd, often held in pubs or relaxed venues where conversation flowed as freely as the drinks.
The name "Mixed Grill" was a nod to the diversity of the web industry itself: developers, designers, strategists, content folks, and tech leads all thrown together like a plate of bacon, sausage, and lamb chops. Events typically featured lightning talks, open mic rants, and plenty of banter, less about polished presentations and more about real-world insights and camaraderie. It embodied AWIA's grassroots ethos: inclusive, unpretentious & proudly Australian.
While it's no longer an active fixture, the Mixed Grill helped shape the tone of AWIA's broader community, one that values connection, transparency & a bit of good-natured chaos.
Back in the 80’s you couldn’t go past a house that didn’t have one of those string arts on their wall. You remember the ones. Nails hammered into a board and string wrapped back and forward until pattern developed, and you were left with what you considered a masterpiece at the end. While some did display a lot of talent, most fell flat and looked exactly what they were, pieces of string wrapped around nails.
Bad wireframing on websites can resemble these 80’s string atrocities. Points placed all over the website in no order create an absolute chaos of pathways to follow. Pathways going everywhere can leave a user thinking "Of course the first place I would check on a website for repairs is to go into accessories. Probably just as logical as finding the contact page as a tiny link under products.” On a number of occassions I used to want to rip down those gastly string arts because they made my brain hurt. Imagine how a user feels upon entering a website with the same schematics.
def: Website wireframes are a visual guide to suggest the layout of elements in the website interface.
So once we have chaos, how do we create order from it. Wireframing from concept is a lot easier than being given a board of nails and a kalaidescope of string going nowhere. Or is it?
We have been given the epitomy of all nightmares website. Navigating around it makes you cringe. We think they are missing many parts of a formal website structure, only to find them in the bowels of some obscure category. So what do we do? We strip the aesthetics and get the website down to raw html with no formatting, flash or javascript. Have it set up live, but obviously not the existing website (not if you want to retian your client anyway!).
We need to know what they "do” have, not what they "think” they have. I have seen websites totally consisting of images, and the clients swore black and blue that they had lots of text to copy and paste into the new website. The majority of clients don’t know what their website consists of. The last thing we want to do is to include a whole section in the wireframe of what the client wants off the existing website, only to find out that we can’t access it, and that it’s going to add considerable charges to their website. Clients can quickly blow out budgets by presuming they have more than what they have.
We now have a better idea of what we are working with. Now to extract the required elements from the old rotting corpse. Sometimes even on the most abominable website we can still tear shreds from it. Don’t just throw them all in one folder to rummage through later. Bring your planning into your folder system. Thoughts of how it might be set up in its new live environment, should be adopted on testservers so crucial items aren’t ommitted. Don’t be confined by attrified sectioning on the old website. In each folder we decide on what photo or images we will be using again, and keep a spare folder for discarded items. Planning how we dismantle is equally as important as it is to plan our construction.
One of the advantages of reconstructing an existing website, is that we come to the party already aware of how various sections have performed until now. We have an idea of how many people hit the front page and run away at lightening speeds. We are in a position to ask for error logs so we are aware of what parts of the website aren’t working to specs.
Where budgets permit, it is a good idea to consult a SEM (search engine marketer) to retain any PR or organic ranking that pages may have amassed. Because we are recycling content, we have to be careful not to kill pre-existing layouts that worked. Even the worst website can have pages that just simply worked. They may have age factor, or just happen to hit on that x-factor. So it’s important to recognize and accomodate these successes and check the ego at the door.