Rebuilding the public site, pt. 2

Last week I talked about the driving forces behind the redesign and redevelopment of OpenSourcery's public site. Those forces boil down to: upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, improving the information architecture, and making it easier to administer content on the site without breaking the look and feel.

But today I want to cover the challenges of parsing site re-design into a three-part cycle: content creation, shaping content into a coherent design, and development. Repeat.

Content, design, development. We're discovering that this cycle is the most efficient way for us to move forward. As with any internal project, we could easily pull a hundred ideas out of the sky and try to implement them willy-nilly, but the time and resource constraints force us to be intelligently iterative. In other words, every minute of time devoted to the project needs to address the most pressing needs, and it needs to create immediate value. Sounds easy enough, right?

To me, creating copy in advance of design seemed like writing the lyrics to a song and passing them along to the composer so he or she could construct a melody around the words. At first I found it extremely difficult. I couldn't envision my words floating in the ether; I had to think of how they would look on the page, how they would be framed, etc. I wanted so badly to know the design before I wrote the copy so that I could simply drop my text into a beautiful box and call it a day.

But the mere act of releasing myself from the shackles of envisioning everything at once has provided relief. It refocuses the act of writing on the rhetorical aspects: what is the audience, what message are you trying to convey, how can you increase efficiency?

The three-part development cycle we've devised stands on its merits. My analysis is that both efficiency and focus increase as a result of parsing the huge task of internal site creation into manageable parts, and then handing those parts to the individuals best suited to deliver value.

Next week I'll share observations from the perspective of a marketing director acting as client in the office at which he is employed. I promise fireworks.

Thank you for reading.