Finally the penny drops. WBShop.com Ver­sion II launches today, after sev­eral years (!!!) of development.

Waaaay back in 2001, not long after start­ing at New Line, I got the oppor­tu­nity to design the offi­cial Warner Bros. online store (long story short: it replaced the failed brick ‘n’ mor­tar stores). It was a huge mar­quee name for my port­fo­lio, and way beyond my skills and expe­ri­ence at the time. It… uh, sucked. But I can con­sole myself by say­ing that was about 4,372 years ago in web-design time.

So at some point, I don’t recall when, my boss began the ambi­tious project of redesign­ing the whole thing from top to bot­tom, for not just aes­thet­ics (my depart­ment) but also func­tion­al­ity (not my depart­ment). As Lead Designer, my role in the project was to, well, design every­thing. But there are numer­ous sources of input, some I can debate and some I sim­ply have to obey. There were sev­eral times when I thought my part of the job was “in the can”, only for the whole process to grind up again all over again. In the midst of all this, my col­leagues were stug­gling with the tech­ni­cal side of things (e-commerce func­tion­al­ity, etc). This went on for some years.

So it was a long, tough expe­ri­ence for me. Once upon I time I was quite pleased with it, and couldn’t wait for it to launch. But then a new E-Commerce Man­ager chipped in with some bull­shit sta­tis­tic say­ing that users (which some of us call “peo­ple”) were .0013% more likely to click on a red but­ton than a blue one. Hence the red but­tons. A com­plete vio­la­tion of my color scheme, which con­tributed to the WB brand­ing as well as drew the eye to the prod­ucts for sale. Even worse, I did ear­lier ver­sions of red but­tons that were more leg­i­ble and pretty, and they were nixed in favor of what you see now: $&#^$ red but­tons all over the place. It may be the first web site with acne.

That’s not my only grudge. I didn’t build any­thing (mean­ing stuff like image opti­miza­tion, HTML cod­ing, etc.), which should be a good thing because I’m a designer, not a devel­oper, Jim. But look­ing at how these web­mon­keys chose to build it, it’s clear to me that I know more about HTML then they do and that’s just wrong. Does it take for­ever to load in your browser? I wash my hands.

Oh well, it’s finally up there for the whole world to see and com­mit com­merce with. What an anti-climax.

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