So how am I spending my time on this?

In the last post, I detailed the process of choosing a colour palette for the ongoing redesign of the university website, and in this post, I'll be giving a rough outline of the time frame for this project, and when I'll be working on it, as I'm only available to work on this a couple of days a week.

The two main deliverables for this project are:

1) a new visual refresh of the site
Our hands are tied somewhat by the fact that we can't really touch the feature set currently used by our installation of Immediacy, the content managing system.

2) a reusable set of templates for staff updating the site
One of the main complaints about the state of the current site is that it's very easy to get lost using it, and its looking is now quite dated. The main thrust of the work on this project is create a set of templates that will be used consistently across the whole site (making it a lot easier to find your way around the site) and allow people to focus on the content of the pages rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, design wise whenever they make a new page.

What we're aiming to do, by when

By 18th Jan
Conducted research, created a colour palette, chose fonts to fit in with the university's own style guidelines, and generally worked out the main priorities for the visual design.

By 8th Feb
First draft for the main web page template designed and sent out for feedback.

By 1st March
Revisions to main page template incorporated to design.
First drafts of sections home pages made available for feedback.

By 14th March
Revisions to section homepages published incorporated to design.
First drafts of main university homepage published for feedback.

By 28th March
Added revisions to the design for university home page.
Tied up the hundreds of loose ends that will have popped up over the course of the project.

I work on this project every Thursday and Friday, until it finishes on March 28th, and now, a third of the way through this twelve week project, we've pretty much got a first draft of the main page template that will be used to house the majority of content on the site.

I'm planning to post it tomorrow, and explain some of the thinking behind it.

On a related note, the irony of blogging with comments off, on a project which can only be improved with feedback from users isn't lost on me or Rob.

We'll be migrating this blog to a platform where we can start getting your feedback directly next week (Agresso permitting...sigh...) - if you have any comments in the meantime, please drop a mail to Rob at webmanager@wmin.ac.uk.