V&A Website launch

Last week I managed to find enough time to head down to London for a sneak peak at the new Victoria & Albert Museum's website. Not only has it had a fantastic new front end design but it also has a rather impressive (and very technical) back end set up!

Running a combination of Drupal, Matrix, an open source search engine, Funnelback and a whole host of very clever, custom written scripts and databases the site runs really very well. It has a host of related content pulled in, clever cloud tags and a very visual design. Admittedly I did sit there a little zoned out as they started to show the lines of code they had written to do all of this but then my ISD colleague appeared to take all that part in!

What I found really interesting was that the catalogue of items held within the V&A had been crawled and compiled with and Open Source enterprise search engine. This doesn't sound that interesting until they mentioned that the catalogue is open to the public and that someone had written an Android application for them! The wonders of opening data up to the world means that people can really chip in and collaborate with you on your work.

Something to bear in mind when we're all sat at our desks working in our silos, a little collaboration goes a long way!

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.....

Bring on the trike!

We had a special visitor on the campus today, a very friendly Google trike was here to start street mapping our campus locations. It turned up in a classic white van and when it was rolled out into the car park it really turned some heads!

So, what did we have done? Well, Luton campus was covered across the front of the new campus centre and all three access routes. We then packed up and moved on to Putteridge Bury canpus where the extensive driveway was shot, a full circle of the building itself and also the landscaped grounds which was a bonus. Lucky the trike could go off road! Finally we headed over Bedford campus and did a full run through of the whole campus layout from the Library round to the accommodation block.

It will take a little while for the images to appear on Google but once in place it does mean that we can embed the street view images into our website, a brilliant addition to our marketing materials!

Many thanks Google!

The design concept is here...

So, wireframes are done and we've moved onto the far more controversial design concepts! I picked them up on Friday from Squiz and overall we're really pleased, we made a couple of initial tweaks here and there to pull some 'real world' content onto the page to make the presentations to the working and steering groups a little easier.

The tricky part now is going to be giving everyone the opportunity to feedback on the look and feel, collate those responses into something usable and then refine the designs! We're looking at holding focus groups with our current students and also to open up an online feedback session for all staff to contribute. I'm expecting a lot of replies to be based around content rather than design but that's only normal!

I would obviously love to put a copy of the designs up on the blog but then that would ruin the surprise!

Wireframes agreed, design here we come!

So after a manic week of meetings I now have final sign off on the wireframe layouts for the new website homepages and content pages. It's fair to say that there will be a significant change in the way our information is presented and the way we work with content within the CMS.

As anyone who has presented a wireframe layout will know it's not the most interesting part of the project unless you're interested in content layout! But, we've put in some very solid foundations to build and expand upon once we take full control of the CMS later this year.

The really interesting part will be on Friday when we get our first look at the concept designs. After an initial viewing it will be down to meetings with the Steering & Working groups to pass out the information for feedback  and everyone has an opinion on visual designs!

Agile? Just call me twinkle toes...

Brace yourself... it's a mini bragging session this one!

So after a four day intensive course in Agile Project Management I finally got the call with the results this morning and... i'm now a certified Agile Project Manager!

Agile started life as a development methodology for software development and has progressed to a very powerful way to manage virtually any project. Ideal for me as we're right in the starting stages of our CMS project and luckily they're using Agile & Waterfall.

The course is well worth thinking about if you are a PRINCE2 PM and are looking to add to your skill set. As a taster, if you can get the idea of the diagram above you're half way there and if you want to know more, check out this entry on Wikipedia.

Congratulations to Julia & Ash who also passed with flying colours, now it's time to apply the methodology to our projects!

Analysis phase... done!

So, we are now five weeks into our project and we are at the end of our Analysis Phase and all of our workshops are done... Phew!

Having had 9 workshops scheduled we managed to wizz our way through and complete them all in only 8 sessions, super efficient! The outcome of all of these workshops is that we now have some detailed wireframes for the website layout and they're looking really good. Even without a design on them the wireframes show that we will have a very visual change to the websites key landing pages and a huge shift towards a site that is focused on our key audience, the prospective student!

So now we have some quiet time where I need to get sign off from the steering group and Squiz need to start work on the design concepts for the website. Then, we start moving into the implementation phase, the data migration and integration stages should prove very interesting. We have a lot of complicated systems at the University and some of the key ones will need to be able to push data to the websites. Luckily initial findings are looking very promising however, I always stay a little concerned until it's all in place and working!

1 month into a 6 month project and not only are we on budget, on time and on scope but we're also all still talking to each other, a very positive sign!