On top of my responsibilities as a Universal Resolution Specialist for the wireless ISP Clearwire, I was also responsible for the construction and maintenance of the community website for the technical support team Gears of Clear. The team was named in the likeness of its supervisor’s chief gaming affinity, Gears of War. In line with that, the team’s emblem was a cross between the game’s “Crimson Omen” and the trademark logo for Clear.

If staffing was adequate, I would be pulled from my typical responsibilities to develop the site. This marked the first time I was paid to do web development, even though it was secondary to my actual job description. Due to the ne’er-predictable nature of workforce availability, I was often interrupted, and the site never had a chance to see a full development cycle. This forced the site to trend toward a strictly utilitarian design.

The site intended to streamline the efforts of the Gears of Clear team, with numerous goals in mind: instant and convenient access to metric information, including daily and month-to-date statistics; provide a platform for experienced technicians to share tips and tricks; act as a source for team- and company-related news, cutting down on superfluous emails; provide useful links and many exclusive applications to cut down on a tech’s need to juggle an excess of paperwork in a call; and lastly, allowing users to customize their equipment with wallpapers and a Firefox persona. This, added to the individual nameplates printed for each member, led to a sense of team unity.

	The site’s index acted as a landing for all the relevant information anyone needed to know. It included any and all recent updates and who’s been doing what around the site, and any notifications about additional features – such as section updates, new gallery posts, or new achievements awarded.
	This is a preview of the site’s Links section. It only represents a sliver of the total content available in the section. There were roughly eight sections of links, sorted using JavaScript-powered tabs. These links were meant to provide a universal resource to each team member, so we were all using the best of the best tools availalble; such as Chasms, the Date and Time calculator, and the MAC Address Lookup.
	The site also featured an Achievements section, very similar to the Blizzard and Microsoft models. Achievement points were listed all over the site: underneath user’s posts in the forum, on the index, and in numerous manifestations in the Achievements section. The achievements themselves were listed in the index featured here, including who had earned them so far. They came in tiers, with each tier providing more points than the latter. The achievement images here are indeed ripped from Starcraft 2, as placeholders.
	Lastly, there was an Achievements Leaderboard to show off who’s been doing the best. Interestingly enough, as far as I’m aware, there was never any official way of tracking the merits of individual employees – so if one had a negligent supervisor, good performance could easily go unrewarded and unnoticed. This section was a tangible way of tracking performance on a merit-based scale, as well.

The site unfortunately never had a chance to see its true potential. While its graphics and associated media were widely used throughout the facility, it required approval from IT security since it dealt with proprietary information. Unfortunately, the approval process was derailed by the outsourcing of the facility’s operations, and the termination of most positions in the facility shortly thereafter.