This week concluded a six-month project to develop a more dynamic website for my ski club, which culminated in the design being scrapped. It’s a bit disappointing, since I had put a decent bit of effort into the beta, and had been advocating a change for at least a year and a half. Ultimately, though, it was a good learning experience, both in terms of technology and project management.
The original goal was to offload some updating responsibilities from our webmaster to a larger group of editors, and to provide more timely updates. This meant moving away from a static, Dreamweaver-generated site to a dynamic content management system, Drupal. Drupal seemed like a good choice from systems I reviewed, being free to use and modify without costly tools, and with a large community of contributors.
A second goal soon overtook the project, though: redesigning the look of the site. It made sense to do both together, but graphic design by committee is a difficult process and took us away from a functional evaluation. After implementing and debating several designs, attention did partially return to functionality, which still came up lacking to many. Admittedly, Drupal - even with TinyMCE and WYSIWYG editing - isn’t the easiest system, but it was still usable.
The classic dilemma of customizing an broader, existing tool versus developing your own tailored but more limited one presented itself. In the end, the latter won out, largely due to the fact that in six months, other ways were found to spread the load of updating the existing site, and other options were presented for the more dynamic pieces.
For myself, I got some first hand experience with Drupal and the politics of project management. The lessons I learned: commit to a visual design before implementation, make early and objective functional evaluations, and engineer the social aspects as much as the technical ones.
