Building the eBay Homepage
I worked at eBay early on in my career, and it was a blast. I started there in December 1999, and it was my third "career job" straight out of college... Well, my reputation for being "vocal" is what landed me in the position of building the then-new eBay homepage. I don't remember the exact details of the conversation other than being in a WebDev meeting and discussing the need to build the homepage, and a team member I really respected said, "Well, why doesn't Hijinio build it?"
I worked at eBay early on in my career, and it was a blast. I started there in December 1999, and it was my third "career job" straight out of college.
How I got to work there was a combination of skills and knowing the right person. In fact, I wasn't even tapping into my connections, but it turns out that my future boss (who was interviewing me) happened to know someone at my current job! (I can't recall the guy's name; I just remember he was really nice. For the curious reader, I was working at Mambo.com, and at that time, it was Evite's main rival.) A few short months later, I was working at eBay.
I was an HTML developer. In fact, I joined the "HTML Group" with a great team of client-side developers. (In my short time there, I was fairly vocal. I advocated having the team's name changed to "WebDev" because we were web developers, not just HTML coders. My boss actually made this name change happen. Ironically, I was focused on writing HTML, and I knew little, if anything about JavaScript; back then, pages were rarely dynamic. People actually used to purposely turn off JavaScript for "security purposes".) So, much of my focus was to take comps from designers and make them into fully functional web pages, with near-perfect accuracy. This was my forte, and I prided myself on being able to build nearly anything with excellent cross-browser compatibility.
An example of how comps were reviewed. (Clickable)
Well, my reputation for being "vocal" is what landed me in the position of building the eBay homepage. I don't remember the exact details of the conversation other than being in a WebDev meeting and the topic of building the new homepage came up. A team member I really respected (named Mason) said, "Well, why doesn't Hijinio build it?" To this day, I don't know if he was putting me to the test because I was always "vocalizing" the best way to build a webpage. Maybe, just maybe, he really believed in my skills... or maybe my "big mouth" would finally cause me to crash and burn with this project. Or, maybe it was both. I just remember being young, eager, and willing to take on this new challenge. So, I joined the committee focused on building the new page.
I remember a series of meetings dedicated to developing it, with members from marketing, business, design, and WebDev. I really only contributed from the perspective of confirming or advising on web capabilities. For example, we talked about the feasibility of building what we nicknamed "the football", which was essentially the navigation for welcoming new users. "Sure, I can build that. No problem." I remember comps were printed out and glued onto these large poster boards. We'd then review various design iterations and provide feedback. Most of the time, these boards were thrown out after a page was built, but every once in awhile, a team member would give me one.
We nicknamed this "The Football". I think some called it "The Eye".
I remember getting the near-final homepage design and building it out within a day. I sent it out to the team. "Thanks, but you didn't have to build it out so soon." I jumped ahead, but to me, that was okay. I just remember being extremely excited about building out the page, and so, it actually became a challenge to figure out how to splice up the images and use tables for the layout. Making it work on Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers were fun too; form tags would do funky things to a table design if not placed in juuuuuuust the right spots. (Side bar: back then, placing the tags between table rows and cells actually pushed the spacing to outside the table, thus resolving any issues with gaps due to the search field.) After the page was built, there a series of additional meetings, but MOST were a blur to me.
The "all new" 2000 homepage for eBay. (Clickable)
After those meetings, I do remember going through a series of tiny tweaks/ fixes with the QA team. Mainly, I remember having to work on some odd fixes for WebTV. Remember those devices? They were meant to be plugged into the old tube televisions so that "mom, dad, grandma, or grandpa" could get on the Internet from the comfort of their living room! The new homepage went live around May 2000.
One humorous sidebar: I inserted my name into the meta tags. Being so young, I wasn't being as thoughtful as I would be today by taking into account all the team member contributions. To me, this meta tag was a signature --- an expression of the pride I had in building "the eBay homepage". As far as I know, only one colleague found this silly and unprofessional; others tease me about it to this day. In fact, I remember that my name was promptly removed after I left eBay; a few phone calls later (or maybe emails), and my name was back in the code. You can still find it at archive.org, to this day.
I made a lot of great friends at eBay. I remember we celebrated "Fresh Choice Fridays" by going to lunch across the street every... you guessed it... Friday. Everybody was incredibly kind, and even though I was technically a contractor, my coworkers made it a point to treat me as a "regular employee". I am grateful for this. Building the homepage for eBay remains a highlight of my career.
Read more
Tweets by hijinior