The Onion

allyraydesign
Feb 28, 2006
2 min read

Updated: Apr 14

Webmaster/Web Designer

Nov 1999 - Feb 2006

Madison, WI & Milwaukee, WI

At The Onion, I started as an HTML coder, was promoted to Webmaster, and became the lead Web Designer. Responsible for developing, maintaining, and optimizing The Onion, AV Club, and Onion Store websites. Coordinated and managed web projects received from Business and Editorial staff, including determining project goals, priorities, and needs, assigning tasks to web staff, and ensuring deadlines were met. Trained, managed, and led the Web Technical Team in web projects including development, server maintenance, and all other site functions. Worked with the System Administrator to optimize The Onion, AV Club, and Onion Store websites to make sure sites were running with 100% performance, optimization, and without errors.

The Onion Redesign

My initial task at The Onion was to redesign the website to ensure consistency between the print and web designs. I took the familiarness and readability of the print design and updated it into a responsive site that was engaging and interactive while executing modern usability features expected of news sites. Designed the page content placement, created custom templates, crafted website landing pages, and designed banner ads. I built and refined CSS stylesheets for all sites.

The Onion Daily Content Uploads and Maintenance

As part of my daily responsibilities, I managed all the content and images for The Onion's websites and products. This involved converting text content from QuarkXpress to HTML, making adjustments and optimizing it for the web, and formatting it into the CMS for daily or weekly publishing. Additionally, I updated content and products on The Onion Store. Published content newsletters and RSS feeds. Managed and optimized website accessibility and SEO.

The Onion Premium Subscription Service

The Onion recognized the rise of online news and thus decided to launch a daily version of their website. As part of this effort, I was entrusted with creating Onion Premium, a subscription-based service that gave users exclusive content and an ad-free browsing experience. To make this possible, I oversaw a team in revamping the site's backend to support daily, weekly, and immediate content scheduling as well as user account management. To achieve our goals, we developed a CMS, database, site architecture, and templates using various programming languages such as PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and XML. These were designed to operate on the Linux RedHat ES platform. I was tasked with coordinating and managing web projects from both the business and editorial teams. This involved identifying project goals, priorities, and requirements, delegating tasks to my team, and ensuring that we met our deadlines.

The A.V. Club

As part of my work with The Onion, I was responsible for maintaining The A.V. Club's website, emails, and ads. In 2005 I redesigned the A.V. Club's website giving it a more user-friendly look and more of its own identity from The Onion.