Web Design

I intend to talk about my experience on the healthcare.gov website for signing up in the state of Wisconsin. So I suppose I should go a little into my knowledge of web design. Do I know what I'm talking about or am I like the elderly person trying to figure out how to buy bananas at the new fangled self-checkout at the grocery store.

I am an electrical engineer who specializes in embedded systems. I do software design and coding and I troubleshoot hardware. In new hardware, sometimes the bug is not in the software but in the hardware. I can find that. I have worked on a number of devices with embedded web servers and their web pages. The first one was all HTML served by embedded web servers and running RTOS's not familiar to the lay public but familiar to embedded people. The last one was Linux running Apache and we used CGIs, JSON and JQuery and all the modernest web doo-hickies.

So I know that much. I know very little about web design, user experience with focus groups, aesthetics, connecting to databases like mysql or oracle (which I gather they use since one of my error messages was from Oracle). And I know nothing about high volume web site design and load balancing on multiple servers.

So that's where I am. I have a sort of educated but peripheral understanding of web sites.