Reflections on a Messy Redesign

I've had this project hanging over my head for the last few (several?) months—the kind that gets so drawn out that everyone involved sort of tries to wish it away. I kind of got a pit in my stomach tonight during class, because it’s a website redesign and everything that Katherine talked about was so on par with why this project has become so convoluted (though, I have to believe, still salvageable).

I volunteered to write the copy for a small nonprofit’s website. The other three people involved are a web designer (who is my former boss), an IT person (who I’d never met), and the organization’s executive director. What happened, I think, is that we all defined our own roles without much consideration to the larger project, and we also assumed that one of us was taking on a project management role. But we never addressed that.

The designer and I had worked closely on our former organization’s website last year—a decent sized center at Harvard. We used a design consulting firm and went through brainstorming, wireframes, mockups, usability testing, and months of planning. It was a good site. So it’s not like we are totally naive about how to redesign a website. But, to be honest, we’re also not being paid for this current site redesign. So, she assumed that she would just design the layout and send the specs to the IT guy who would build out the pages and I would write copy that would be placed into these pages.

No one took it on themselves to decide what the content would be. The architecture and navigation was based off of a first draft of the web principles. I was given a list of topics, like “About Us” and “Volunteer Information” to write copy for. I kept asking for a site map, the designer kept asking for content, and we still don’t know who is actually populating the pages. We all looked to the organization’s executive director, who had wrangled us all in, to be the project manager. But she’s never been involved with any sort of new site or redesign. She knows what she wants the website to be from her executive perspective, but there is no one to manage the actual site development.

So now we’re at that point right that Katherine warned us of tonight. We had this emergency conference call last week (the first time we had all met—even over the phone) to figure out where all the copy was supposed to go, why some of the proposed content was/wasn’t relevant, and what we all expected of ourselves and one another. Oh, and we ended up changing the navigation—but that’s still not finalized. And the executive director wants to launch it the first week in December.

It’s been an invaluable learning experience for me from a project management perspective—it’s just too bad it had to become such a mess. Although I’ve been working in web publishing for a few years now, I feel like I’m still getting my feet wet. Has anyone else had an experience like this? Or have you come across the types of roadblocks that Katherine was talking about in class?