Last September, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column on how to survive a website redesign for the December 2006 issue of University Business: “10 Tips to a Successful Website Redesign.â€
Lisa Cameron-Norfleet, Program Manager Developer Relations at Cornell University shared these 5 tips at this time.
Establish your boundaries (scope) clearly and as early as possible.
It’s very likely that the initial scope list will be added to (and almost never subtracted from!!) during the course of the project, but
it’s important to have that list to work from when administrators start throwing things at you last minute. You need to be able to say “Certainly, Mr. President, we can do that. But what would you like us to NOT do in it’s place.”
While buy-in is important, you have to balance the concepts of consensus and deadline.
One of the reasons that the 2004 redesign of Cornell’s site worked well, IMO, is that we had a unique opportunity (turnover in our senior administration) to put our heads down and come up with a plan that was not based on political wants and needs. We got to build the best site we could build–with the understanding that there was room to add-on and address those political aspects later.
So, as much as #2 might sound like “design your site in a box”, I DO think that communication and buy-in is extremely important to the success of the site.
Our redesign blog was a crucial tool in showing our audience what was in the works and establishing a conversation about the new site. You have to be careful to set the tone of such a blog, though…we made sure it was very clear that we would listen to all ideas, but that the site was not being built by a democracy.
Take the time up-front to build a solid architecture for your content.
The places where we have failed on cornell.edu are the ones where we pasted an idea together and said “We’ll figure this out later”.
ORGANIZATION.
You need at least one (preferably more) person who is a wizard at organizing people, details, and work-flow. Someone has to keep track of all the content input flow and the million little things on the to-do list.
