On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:50:43 +1200 Came this utterance formulated by Paul Bennett to my mailbox:
> Hi all, > > Apologies for the cross post, but there are some great minds lurking > out there and I need access to all of them :) > > I work for a small .govt and have been charged with rebuilding the > corporate site (many years old - all static and pretty messy). > At first I thought myself and another developer could rebuild the site > quietly in the Ministries cms-of-choice (Drupal) and involve relevant > content editors along the way to inform the rebuild a bit. > I wrote a brief business case and originally was given the all-clear. > > Then it went to senior management and I've since been charged with > forming a project group with a represntative of every business group > in the Ministry and running the project via the group with everyone > getting to pitch in their 10c worth. > > I'm not overly excited, especially since I've seen firsthand how > internal politics and endless meetings can strecth out a project like > this. Often the the end result is something which meets everyone's > perceived needs except the users and ends up having abandoned features > in a few months when the people who are excited about "blogging" or > "social networking" or "real-time chat" realise the actually have to > update content and can't be bothered. > > I've also seen great websites built on short timeframes and small > budgets where the project team was little more than a coordinator, a > designer and a developer or two. > > Seeing as it's unlikely that I'm going to be able to avoid the > traditional round-table project team thing, I'm looking for ways to > get away from brainstorming on a whiteboard to actually getting users > to test and provide feedback on the site as we go along. > > I'm leaning towards putting together some kind of usable prototype > before the project officially starts, so we have something to guide > and base decisions on, rather than things that sound fancy when > spouted off in a meeting room. > > Any ideas / pointers? Raise your concerns with any of the committee members you can talk to before the meeting. Have a raft of information available at meeting one about the complexities of website design. Encoding, XHTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, Design, Standards based design, WCAG, NZGov guidelines, Databasing etc. Then when everybody is looking totally blank, talk about the fact that content is king, the need for lots of good regularly updated content and working to everyones strengths. Find out each persons specialties and try to get them creating content hard out in their area. Set a sub committee of 2-4 balanced developers/managers to filter content. If any of them have design skills/quals get them in on the template design. Take your own menu layout as the basis for the storyboard and be prepared to discuss it to death over two or three meetings but look to setting a hard and fast menu before the web site is up. I've been there when people are trying to micro-manage the border colour of the rounded corners on the menu by committee and it isn't pretty. You don't want it. -- Michael All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well - Julian of Norwich 1342 - 1416 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
