Architecture of UI autotests

It doesn't matter how much experience of software testing you have - we all are tempted by the thought to automate our tests in a quick and dirty way. This leads to the birth of wicked monsters that consume all time of their creators and ultimately paralyze the test automation process. 

We fell into this trap too, when we gave our testers Selenium and PHP and let them roam free. To find a way out of this predicament we decided to create a framework that would establish a solid architecture for our UI-autotests. 

How does it look? And how did we apply popular software testing patterns in our practice? 

That's what I will talk about.