The Cobbler's Children: A redesign in process

You know how the saying goes: the cobbler's children have no shoes. Ditto for the web studio and their website. We've historically struggled mightily with getting our own web house in order every 3 years or so and frequently get beyond a point where we're in desperate need of a retooling. The story is always the same: putting client work/client needs first. That said, we work really well with deadlines and our current one is Lauren's impending maternity leave. A date arriving all too soon, and not one with room for extensions.

So. We're putting our collectives noses to the grindstone and getting our own house in order over here, and it's been a really rewarding and illuminating process, I think for the team, but certainly for me.

Now I've helped guide, manage and strategize at this point hundreds of web projects, so the nitty gritty is no big surprise to me, what I have been noticing, as we pull our team together to work on this project, is just how fantastic our team is at thinking big picture. And, as we go through the process of the redesign and development, I'm very conscious of the value that taking the time to really go through each stage of the process brings to ending up with a better final product. It shouldn't be surprised by this, afterall, that kind of thoughtful consideration, consulting and big picture strategic thinking is exactly what our clients hire us for, it's just been a long time since we had the opportunity to really dig in and apply it to ourselves.

Because I'm finding the whole process of doing the redesign so valuable, I thought that rather than wait until the new site is done to start sharing stories of it with you, I'd start trying to regularly document the process here. I figure it's a win win, I can both share stories that we might not be able to normally share during client work due to privacy concerns and, as an added bonus, by documenting things I can help keep momentum going internally as we move along.

So, where are we at:

• We have a site architecture/wireframes that are now over a year old (see notes about always putting client work first), but that we've managed to modify to incorporate current content needs;
• We have  new design, done by Lauren, which is now 93% done and which we're going to build out and tweak on an interactive site, rather than keep fussing with in the mockup stage;
• We have an excellent Alpha site that was built out by our dev team about a year ago and which sadly has to be largely scrapped at this point as it's in Drupal 6 and we want to do our new site in Drupal 7 (cue sad trombone);
• We're half way into a content audit and need to identify what content needs to be updated, rewritten or created for the new site;
• We need to schedule a custom photoshoot to get some key shots for the new design (fun!).

What's interesting me about where we're currently at in the process?

Our process for working with clients is very consultative, and perhaps thanks to that atmosphere, or simply due to the types of people we have on staff here, I've been really enjoying being challenged by our staff when we have project meetings to really think through decisions that are being made, bringing some smaller decisions back to the big picture goals. As experts in this field it's really easy to think that our first instincts for decisions are the right ones, but it's always worth taking a step back to ask "why?".

In our last meeting, Matt asked: "What are we doing with this site to make sure it works for us in the long run?" His question related to both maintaining content from a content creation perspective as well as how we configure the development of the site to ensure that site updates and changes are as easy as possible (again, see always putting client work first, leaving the need to maximize efficiency for keeping our own house in order). We always try to keep the big picture goals and questions top of mind when working with clients, and I appreciated being brought back to think strategically about our own site. As we move forward, I'm carefully keeping those questions (along with a few others) top of mind when reviewing design concepts, making IA decisions and thinking through the functionality to prioritize for site launch.