The problem with the design of AA.com, however, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines.
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But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like.
[ Mr X, Lead IA Guy at American Airlines, from Dear Dustin Curtis ]
It strikes me that websites may be a good visual indicator of the internal workings and philsophy of a company. It certainly shows more about a company’s processes and values than, say, their letterhead or offices.
Also, Mr. X makes an excellent point about redesigns on large sites. They are a _huge_ pain.
