In 1998, I was called in on contract to work for one of the most-recognized brands on Earth, Hallmark Cards.My job at first was pretty simple - make sure everything looked and worked correctly on the newly-unveiled Hallmark e-commerce site.
I thought this would be easy, but Hallmark bought a, shall we say, difficult content management system called Broadvision. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and had lots of limitations, even for the time during the expansion of online shopping and surfing.
After saving the site from absolute disaster a few times, they thought it best to hire me on full time to coordinate all materials going into the property. I had just taught myself the Windows operating system a mere 10 months before, and each day presented a new challenge.
These days, I'm not sure what Hallmark builds their site with, but they most likely learned their lesson in the years after I left the company in 2000.
So to recap:
What I learned-
- MS Office Suite
- Broadvision CMS
- The importance of corporate culture
- Office politics