Site Rebuilding in the New Year
Apologies for the hiatus: at least my first post of the new year is pre-February!
Why so busy? Site rebuilds. I’m working on a range of site rebuilds at the moment. January is a classic time for this: just like we do in our private life, businesses tend to look at the their new year’s budget and make a few resolutions.
I’m working with a range of business types, sizes, and budgets. With this mix comes a cloud of CMS systems. Sadly, one of those is Websphere, but on the plus side one is Drupal :-). I also have a feeling that there will be a first of a kind blend of Websphere and Wordpress on one project!
It’s incredible when you think about it that a business would spend thousands of pounds on IBM’s famously inflexible CMS tool, then host a free, open source blogging CMS alongside so that content can be easily and quickly hosted.
But then, web design’s always throwing up these paradoxes.
Building a great website: foundations
What do you do first on a site rebuild?
This is my favourite stage of a web build project. I love getting to the core of a web accessible, seo focused, user friendly site. For me, this starts when you’ve got a whiteboard in front of you, a clutch of marker pens, and the key site stakeholders all in the same room to make decisions. The speed with which you can make decisions and plough forwards through the key broad strokes steps is always astonishing.
Getting a feel for the finished product while in these stages is important, and to make the best decisions you need experienced people in the room. It’s a huge win for a site’s SEO to have an understanding of how the code will need to be laid out to achieve a certain structure - and what impact that will have. A savvy designer will know their code and be able to ensure you degrade gracefully for your mobile audience (you haven’t thought of your mobile audience? Start thinking).
There’s challenges, of course, but getting the right decision in place the first time pays off throughout the course of a build. Some of my current projects won’t complete until cSeptember - and I’d add on the obligatory 15% overrun time to that deadline too ;-), but they are all looking in good shape and I plan to give some more detailed updates relating to build tips and tricks, common problems, quick wins, and insider know-how.
Assuming I can get everything off the whiteboards and into the mock-ups that is…