Making it happen

1
Making it happen

• A6 - Web Site RedevelopmentIWMW 2001 Organising
  Chaos

2
Implementation
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Kents case

• Structure and content from in-house
• Design and template preparation by consultants
• So - how to find the right outside company?

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Criteria

• Varied portfolios
• Experience with public sector companies
• Well-presented corporate sites
• Structural design
• Interface design
• Graphic design

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First round

• 30 companies chosen from
• Yahoo.co.uk - UK Web Design houses
• New Media Age
• Internet Magazine
• Other Websites
• Other design magazines
• word of mouth

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First round (cont.) and invite

• Small group of publications team and designers
  whittled down and chose 9 companies with a
  reserve list of 7
• 9 companies invited to tender
• brief
• covering letter
• publications pack
• suggested timeline to be followed if successful

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The brief - important bits

• Why Kent needed a new site
• Who the site was for
• What resources were available to maintain it
• What technological aspirations were there
  (standards, browser compliance, speed)
• Corporate style and publications pack
• Have a contract - with penalty clauses

8
Second round

• 5 companies accepted and tendered 13 designs in
  all
• 45 staff and students invited to come and see -
  carefully chosen
• Evaluation / ratings forms filled in by each
• 3 companies invited to interview - 2 companies
  very popular and a third added due to popularity
  amongst design staff

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Third (and final) round

• Three companies invited to present their designs
  to selection panel of 8
• Senior management (including VC)
• Web committee reps
• Director of CDO and Web Editor
• University designer
• Students Union

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The project

• Keymedia chosen
• Initial meeting on-site with successful company
• Communication via email and phone through design
  stages and then coding
• Each stage involved a signing-off process

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Staffing

• Keymedia
• Project manager - liaison role
• Designer - initial stages until design signed off
• Coder - later stages until end of project
• Design and technical managers - checks
• In-house
• Web Editor - 1 fte
• Support - .8 fte lt 2.3 fte for final fortnight
• University designer - checks

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Content

• Re-organisation of current content - lengthy but
  possible
• maintenance issues solved by pigging-backing on
  paper publications schedules
• New content - tricky and time consuming
• Who provides this and how often?
• Will they meet your deadlines for the re-design?
• Can your Web team do it all? Should they?

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Challenges

• Designers need to know limitations of Web as well
  as opportunities
• Coders need to have read the brief or at least
  been told about it
• Coders (ideally) should be as good or better than
  your in-house ones
• Project manager needs to know their colleagues
  and be aware of all issues

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Costs

• 25k server on special offer (Sun Ultra 450 - lots
  of memory and big disks)
• 500 to each company who tendered
• Estimates of 8-18k for same brief
• Tell them what you have and they will spend it -
  is this a good idea?
• Razorfish - no marketing, no need - average
  client 100k - -(

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Milestones

• Structure finished
• Design drafts 1 2
• Final designs
• Coding of a page 1
• Templates drafts 1 2
• Final Templates
• Content written
• Scripts installed and tested on server

• Validation and accessibility checks done
• Templates and content merged
• User testing
• Be prepared to go back to an earlier stage

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Consultation

• Strategy - management
• Structure - users (as far as possible),
  management and peers
• Interface and graphic design - usability
  literature, accessibility guidelines and user
  testing

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Management and maintenance
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Those involved ...

• Content writers
• HTML coders
• Information managers
• Graphic designers / Multimedia
• Server maintainers - script installers
• Stats producers

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Low maintenance options

• PDFs
• Static pages for static content
• Databases for retrieval and collection
• SSIs - Server Side Includes
• Stylesheets
• Dreamweaver templates and Library items
• Excellent search and replace tools

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How not to waste time and effort

• Use tools that save time
• Make sure that all pages have a purpose
• Check they meet that purpose
• Do not tie your Web site to any particular
  technology
• Try not to duplicate the page length, writing
  style and graphic design of paper documents -
  change your content to fit the medium
• Prioritise your activities to fit those of
  University

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High maintenance options

• Regularly changing structure
• High graphics intensity for text and fonts
• Templates that cannot be changed globally once
  applied
• Static pages for regularly changing content
• No search and replace tools
• Text editor page editing