The new gradlink site went live on 21 March ‘03, the launch date planned 4 months earlier and approximately a year after GCCA first spoke to us about a rebuild. Since then, the site has worked well and GCCA are now in full control of their site. About a month after we went live, we conducted a project debrief with GCCA to find out what we all thought went well and what could have been improved.

What went well

• delivered on time

• looks great

• have received positive feedback

• designIT & GCCA worked well as a team

• good planning upfront

• user survey helped focus project

• open communication on both sides, able to give & receive advice

• high levels of trust

• integration with Seek & GO was straightforward

What could have been improved

• closer review of content to see how it fits into the CMS and content types defined

• selection of a mature product (eg. not in beta) to prevent the risk of delays and difficulty in usage

5 months later

About 2 months after the initial launch, designIT planned and worked on a much reduced Stage 2, mostly a cosmetic update but also more importantly the final version (3.0) of eZ publish which fixed some of the temporary solutions we implemented to launch on time and improved performance of the site through better caching and template management. Other than that, everything is working fine and we are now planning the next stage to add the next set of functionality.

In Conclusion

The project as a whole was a great success.

Each stage of the project was valuable in shaping the following stage and in turn the end result. The user survey helped shaped the requirements, which helped shape, the functional specifications and so on. There were definitely times that we all felt that we were spending too much time documenting and not enough time building. But the speed, ease of implementation and small amount of changes needed since the launch proved the effort spent upfront was well worth it and is standing us in good stead as we plan Stage 3.

As a product, eZ publish has proven to be a quality solution and eZ systems a professional organization to deal with. The product is well supported and future releases will add valuable features.

The hardest part of the project was understanding the difference between content and the presentation of that content as a page on a website, ie. how to break a site down into its elements (content, templates) and then re-construct as a page on a website based on a series of rules.

Defining the information architecture is where the real challenge and real value lies in implementing a CMS.