Yahoo! Messenger

messenger.yahoo.com (screenshot)

As of November 2007, Yahoo! Messenger was the most popular IM service in the United States. I was hired to lead the front-end development portion of the new site which launched in May 2008.

The existing site was already several years old. It was littered with HTML tables, inline CSS and JavaScript, was plagued with a number of one-off promo pages that substantially decreased site performance. The new site was intended to resolve all of those issues and more.

What was done

• Moved to a proprietary MVC framework called Croissant, where actions, data classes, and templates were all kept separate.
• Built with validated HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS, image spriting and compression, unobtrusive JavaScript, and best web practices.
• Goal of sub-1 second load times from one "page complete" to the next "page complete", with front-end, back-end, server, and design teams cooperating to ensure success. When launched, most pages loaded in under a second.
• Navigation was kept simple, and used labels that were very clear as far as what they held for the visitor.
• Designed the entire front page to contain everything important in an 1024x768 window.
• Content was localized for 29 countries/languages.

Involvement

Front-end development (including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, object-oriented PHP, image optimization, and performance-tuning).