Website Relaunch

Does L2 have any recommendations?  Presumably they'll be heavily involved in this, and of course it's something they've done with numerous organizations, so they've probably seen more and less successful approaches.

For our last big revision we involved an outside project manager to keep track of all the moving parts.  That was actually a condition dictated by our funding, but was certainly a nice thing to have.  The key parts seemed to be:

• Outside project manager
• Formal project management system
• Committee composed of the most technical users from each relevant department

Outside project manager: having someone outside of normal reporting helps to keep focus on the project from drifting towards whatever a career employee's field of focus is, and also helps keep management of the project free of the kind of extraneous minutia that people who are part of an organization necessarily have cluttering up their heads.  The down side is that the outside project manager is never going to have a strong sense of how the organization operates, so learning how to communicate just enough information to them is key, and a good practice for helping you keep focused as well.

This often comes with the project manager, as they will be charged with most of the setup and maintenance.  As such, we used Sharepoint.  Other organizations with a lower pain tolerance might prefer a cat o'nine tails or the rack.  But any productivity tool will work as long as you commit to using it.

People with stronger technical expertise are to be greatly preferred for committee membership over directors or content creators.  They will better understand how what is largely a technical project relates to their particular department and will be the best people to translate the otherwise bewildering array of options into simpler A or B decisions for management (when necessary) and are also most likely to understand that content on websites exists to provide a small, patterned space between buttons.

Does L2 have any recommendations?  Presumably they'll be heavily involved in this, and of course it's something they've done with numerous organizations, so they've probably seen more and less successful approaches.

For our last big revision we involved an outside project manager to keep track of all the moving parts.  That was actually a condition dictated by our funding, but was certainly a nice thing to have.  The key parts seemed to be:

• Outside project manager
• Formal project management system
• Committee composed of the most technical users from each relevant department

Outside project manager: having someone outside of normal reporting helps to keep focus on the project from drifting towards whatever a career employee's field of focus is, and also helps keep management of the project free of the kind of extraneous minutia that people who are part of an organization necessarily have cluttering up their heads.  The down side is that the outside project manager is never going to have a strong sense of how the organization operates, so learning how to communicate just enough information to them is key, and a good practice for helping you keep focused as well.

This often comes with the project manager, as they will be charged with most of the setup and maintenance.  As such, we used Sharepoint.  Other organizations with a lower pain tolerance might prefer a cat o'nine tails or the rack.  But any productivity tool will work as long as you commit to using it.

People with stronger technical expertise are to be greatly preferred for committee membership over directors or content creators.  They will better understand how what is largely a technical project relates to their particular department and will be the best people to translate the otherwise bewildering array of options into simpler A or B decisions for management (when necessary) and are also most likely to understand that content on websites exists to provide a small, patterned space between buttons.