Workshops, Workshops, Workshops...

We are now into the latter half of the Workshop sessions with Squiz to look at what we want to include in the new University website. Some workshops have been great (wireframes, design, etc) and some have been rather slow, but necessary, Metadata & taxonomy for example (Sorry Nelson!)

However, what does appear to be coming out in these meetings is that the are very similar ides around what the website should do. For example, functionality wise people expect the website to degrade well when viewed on a mobile device. If that question was asked a few years ago people wouldn't have put a Responsive Design at the top of their lists! This not only highlights the fact that people are aware of smart phones but also that they way in which people are using them is changing as well. We currently have 15% of all our visitors coming to us on a mobile device, that's double the figure for this time last year... This highlights the moving target we are dealing with, potentially as soon as we deliver the website we will need to start development work to keep up with the evolving market! A great argument for a structured development plan...

However, one of the most exciting parts of the analysis stage (for me) is looking at what issues people currently have and how they can be fixed, effectively trying to make peoples lives easier! The list is reasonably long, as you would expect with a project this size, but so far nothing has been highlighted that can't be dealt with.

As we roll into our last few weeks of workshops it make me even more confident that the next 7 months will be extremely exciting...

Technical Workshops... done!

We're only a few weeks into the official Web Development Project and we have already completed the scheduled technical workshops. Over the last two weeks we have had two full day workshops spread over two weeks. The aim of these was to look at drawing out an understanding of the current infrastructure at UH (University of Hertfordshire) and what we would like to create as our hosting environment on the Squiz Cloud.

Changing hosts will always present a number of potential issues but the main one at UH is being able to replicate what is proving to be a very efficient set-up. This is mainly due to the fact that the current UH hosting solution is in-house, bespoke built and running off the JANET network. In order to offer a comparable level of service we will need to be looking at rolling out all of the bells & whistles possible!

On our side we have the team who created and maintain the current content delivery and during the course of the two workshops a number of ideas came to light. A follow up meeting to iron out the details and i'm sure we'll be running an amazing set-up to host our newly designed, responsive website!

Design concepts... done!

After a furiously busy week last week we finally have an agreed design concept and functional specification.

The original design concept that came across was really good but as you can probably guess, everyone has an opinion on what the website should look like and so we needed to make some tweaks! In order to take the designs forward Squiz passed us the PSD files (try that with another agency!) and I sent them out to our internal designers for tweaking.

The only real area that needed looking at was the banner slot and how the banners will be displayed.The following day I had 5 alternative designs sent back to me and using a combination of two (thanks Mick & David) I presented the final design concept to our Steering Group members and it was happily signed off.

A great example of some flexible working and collaboration!

The functional specification document was a different beast as that one was down to me and a lot of reading time! Luckily the workshops we held at the beginning of the project helped to focus on what we wanted delivered and apart from having to read and re-read a 110 page document it required little changing. The advantages to doing some planning in the early stages certainly paid off and the final functional specification was signed off on Friday as well.

Tweaked, signed and done... phew! Now it's time to move on to the additional designs, project plan, build... migration.... testing.....