Alexis Gallisá |ga-jee-SAH|: Graphic Designer, Magazine Owner & Art Director, XHTML/CSS Coder, Flash Developer, & Photographer.

Over the last 6 months or so I have been working over at CNET Networks Business Unit (ZDNet, Techrepublic and BNET) as the Senior Interactive Designer. Today I am proud to announce the official re-launch of BNET.com. Internally we have been referring to the site as BNET 2.0 since technically BNET.com has existed for some time, but what exists today is a site built from the ground up from a design, editorial and production point of view.

What is BNET? Well to quote our staff post about what is BNET:

BNET was created with a simple goal in mind: to provide working professionals with the tools, advice, and insight they need to succeed in today’s workplace. BNET isn’t for those who merely punch the clock each day from 9 to 5. Instead, it’s for people who are committed to nurturing their own excellence, who believe in the meaning of work, and who know that a fulfilling career is an excellent way to make personal ambitions come true.

Design and Code (also known as what I do to put food Beaumont’s bowl)

Early on our we decided that we wanted to create a site who’s style and content would really separate us from the other business minded websites. All the credit in the world goes to my boss (some would say accomplice) Marc Mendell (Art Director of CNET Business) for really honing in early on of our color scheme and logo. The banker’s light green and complementary tan/brown/red have really proven to be a pretty big hit with our focus groups and distinguishes us from others in the same field. Which by the way, one big perk of working at CNET is that we actually do focus groups studies (think two way mirrors and video cameras) and can really help in the design process.

After this had been established Marc and I really hit our stride and were able to create some really engaging design treatments for our crashcourses, blogs and rest of the site. I think we really tried to make the information quickly digestible and easy on eye strain. Focus groups again helped reaffirm our methodology for treating text in bite size chunks and using several different treatments to help distinguish content.

There is a lot of custom artwork being created for our feature packages and blog identities. Our plan is to keep this up and I think it really helps give the site some real character and something to look forward to for return visitors. Currently the custom illustrations can be seen in the home page carousel, feature packages and in the blogs. The home page carousel is a customized version of Macc/IpariGrafika open source page flip flash piece (based on version 2).

Everything isn’t perfect and there are parts we are already working to fix but overall I think its a very successful launch, and we have big plans for the site.

I am asked a lot about what its like working at CNET, and while I can’t speak about any of the other groups (Redball, Community, Entertainment, etc), the Business Unit is filled with some wildly talented people and it sometimes boggles my mind to think of how much we get done and how much there is always to do to get a site like this up and running, and keep it running. The entire process includes a lot of late nights, CNET ordering tacos for lunch, daily scrums and overall one of the best experiences I have had in the workplace. I am in a rather unique position in the business unit. My role encompasses being a bridge between design, tech production and editorial. Basically walking into any meeting and being able to communicate to either side what is going on from each side’s point of view and this has really helped our process of getting things done.