Hi, I’m Kenji. I do some front-end development around here, and I thought I’d help you get to know your new barbariangroup.com!

It’s been a relief to get this site finally out the door and in front of all you nice internet people. As Rick said (to some perhaps-deserved derision), it took over six months to bring barbariangroup.com version four (internally codenamed Merrimack) to fruition. That’s a crazy long time, sure. But we’re a small, busy shop, and couldn’t blow through this in a month. Not while continuing to pump out high-quality projects for Kashi, CNN, Adobe, TAP Project, Motorola, etc etc. We approached the barbariangroup.com version four redesign as seriously and as carefully as we would any content-rich client site, and as such, it took some time. And some people.

Justin and Rick did some heavy lifting early on in the IA department, building out specifications, OmniGraffle outlines, user interface docs, and sitemaps for the front and backend. Two heavy lifters in our tech department, Toby and Chandler, gave the project some direction, guidance, and methodology (for most of us, this was our first project working with SCRUM).

Information architecture is great and all, but it’s not much to look at. We pulled two designers onto the project: the (sadly) recently-departed Kristen Hengst and the great John Sullivan Hamilton. You have them to thank for a gorgeously clean, minimalist site design. As the front-end developer on this project, I jumped in and started preparing XHTML comps from their Photoshop blueprints. Meanwhile, Ashley and Adam began development of a massive Ruby on Rails backend, simultaneously building a new CMS to power this site and rolling in old data – hundreds of projects, blog posts, and employee information from previously-disparate systems.

By no small feat of producing skill, Rachel kept this project in line and continuously progressing throughout the final six months of her pregnancy. Our ex-intern and current-freelancer Emma Welles helped get all the data into shape, and Eva is in the midst of a monstrous proofreading job. Our IT pros, Nick and Ian kept everything running, restarted servers when we totally broke them, and pitched in for QA.

We launched at the auspicious time of 4:20pm last Friday, to office-wide cheers and beers. And it worked! OMG!

Of course, this is an Agile project, and the site’s not “done” by any means. We’ve been cranking out bugfixes, updates, and enhancements like mad. The development team has pushed out a staggering 79 revisions in the six days since the site launched. Site traffic has been up, Barbarians are blogging quickly, and the site is getting better every day.

Anything you’d like to see on here? Site totally broken for you? Site totally awesome for you? Let us know!