IWMW 2001: Web Site Redevelopment (2)

Making it happen
A6 - Web Site Redevelopment
IWMW 2001: Organising Chaos

M.E.C.Banbery@ukc.ac.uk : 26/06/2001
(c) 2001, The University of Kent at Canterbury
Kent’s case
Structure and content from in-house
Design and template preparation by
consultants
So - how to find the right outside company?

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

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

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

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

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

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 C&DO and Web Editor
– University designer
– Students’ Union

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

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 < 2.3 fte for final fortnight
– University designer - checks

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?

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

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+ - :-(

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

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

Those involved ...
Content writers
HTML coders
Information managers
Graphic designers / Multimedia
Server maintainers - script installers
Stats producers

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

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

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

IWMW 2001: Web Site Redevelopment (2)

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