public-facing site

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.

Five months ago, OpenSourcery embarked on a mission to revamp its website. We had two primary goals: to update our site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, and to improve the visitor experience. With this blog we're adding a third goal: to document our process from design and content perspectives.

The central conceit of this series is that, as software developers working on our own site (in effect, acting as both client and shop), our work is never done. We want to own the fact that development requires a series of compromises. The trick is to prioritize, iterate, and create value at every step. So we invite you to peer behind the curtain as we transform our site from the screenshot you see below to the site to which you've navigated today to future, more perfect versions.

THE PAST [The following image, too, represents improvements over earlier versions. -Ed.]:

So, while the website you see today is the product of improvements, not least of which lie "below the surface," it can and must continue to improve.

The plan is to divide improvements into the content and design arenas and to deploy improvements great and small every week. The content arena includes copy, messaging, creation and maintenance of a coherent site personality, and high-level decisions regarding the priority of content types; the design arena encompasses interface, architecture, and beautiful-making.

In the interest of keeping this posting relatively brief and introductory, I'll end it here. Please check back for updates on our initial roadblocks, how we overcame them, and what we plan to do from here (a classic narrative).

Thank you for reading.