I am going to give ourselves a pat on the back over the last few years of redesigns and site developments, helped to no small degree by getting all our sites off AWS (Amazon Web Services), which must be the most disempowering, retrograde set-up for hosting I have encountered in 30-plus years of working in this medium. Amazon sure makes a lot of money with second-rate tech.
A dear friend helped here, but I have to respect his request for anonymity.
Until 2021, most of our sites had templates designed by yours truly, and it was a big deal to base new ones off responsive templates that others had developed. By 2021 it was clear cellphone browsers were not going to develop the way we thought they would. We expected a repeat of the 1990s, which saw technologies that could break down complex pages and make them readable for Palm Pilots and smaller screens. Whereas 2010s browsers would render the body type at a readable size, the turn of the decade saw them get very confused about what size to render it at. It was clear our media queries weren’t cutting it, and I determined that an HTML Codex template would allow for a reasonably faithful adaptation for Lucire’s website look. We announced this in October 2021, just before Lucire’s 24th anniversary.
Next was JYA Creative, after we decided that JY&A Consulting was too vague a name. July 2023 saw a fresh start for that side of the business, and to answer what we did, some examples of work—still a very tiny sliver of the whole portfolio—were uploaded. I still fear that people don’t know the whole story behind the work, but then the process itself is proprietary. Still, I remain very proud of this site and the team’s work. A new symbol also made its début. Originally, we felt this would be exclusive to JYA Creative, but we’ve since taken it to JY&A Media. The new look (template by HTML Codex) replaced one that only dated back to 2021, which wasn’t serving us.
At the end of 2023, we created Libriz, our online bookshop, originally to retail the new Autocade yearbook. This was not our first attempt at an e-commerce site—we had various attempts over the last 20 years—but it was the first on Woocommerce. Again, this was on an existing template (Neve), which we modified less than others, but I feel we got the best of both worlds: it looks on-brand for our work, and it’s familiar to those who order things online. Before long we were adding Lucire and other titles to Libriz.
In June 2024, JY&A Media got its revamp. BootstrapMedia provided the template this time, and we hand-coded our look and feel. We had some advice behind the scenes from an external company—even those of us involved in the business need a fresh set of eyes to cast a critical eye over our portfolio—and JY&A Media needed a big rethink to show the direction we were heading in. I can’t tell you off-hand how old the previous site’s template was, but the header image showed an issue of Lucire from 2014. It really wouldn’t surprise me if it was 10 years old when we retired it.
Not long after (August 2024), the main company site followed suit, using the same BootstrapMedia template. In amongst the great Semrush-user disinformation campaign, we still found time to bring Jack Yan & Associates into the 2020s. The biggest design challenge was getting the look into the information section, which was on Wordpress, requiring modifications to Understrap. I like to think we’ve done a pretty good job.
Finally, as part of JY&A Media’s plans, Autocade World made its début in January 2025 as a consumer-oriented “portal” for Autocade-branded activities. This entire site was Wordpress, and we needed an efficient members-only section, since we were going to charge some dough for the special content (such as digital editions of the yearbooks, but there will be more). I will build this up to be more comprehensive, but for now it’s a safe, privacy-respecting place for existing customers to get some perks, and for the old social-media communities to flock to (if they ever do!).
We’re progressing at the pace we did before we ever set eyes on the three-letter-acronym-heavy, nonsensical, overpriced and confusing AWS, so hopefully this decade will bring about more innovations and possibilities for our customers, partners and ourselves.
The seventh site done in this period was, of course, this one. But it’s not a company site.
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