Site slips

We’re going to be late with the site. Apologies for the over eagerness last week, I’m young and excitable and we had all the content complete but some of the back-end stuff is taken longer than usual.

I don’t want to make excuses, but the site is more complicated than it looks. There are very few levels to the website yet all these need to be linked at various stages and in a specific order. For instance: each case study has an introductory question and answer. The question will be featured in the banner on the home page with the answer on the expertise page. This then has to be linked to the actual case study page itself which pulls the contact from the staff database [which itself is dynamic]. Obviously this also has to be synched up, so that the questions and answers all match for each visit.

There is also the issue of the blog feeds. We need to aggregate all our posts which update automatically and include the relevant picture. This is probably the issue that is taking longest to fix but looks like it’s pretty much there.

We tried to have a basic site to go live with on the 15th but decided that it might do more damage than good and as I’ve already mentioned, large areas of the site are dependent on each other. The site is only worth going ahead with if we can have all the integrated levels working properly. It may not be perfect at the time of launch but it will be at a point where would be happy for our clients and potential clients to visit it.

We’ve set a date of Monday 27th October to launch. Fingers crossed.

Comments

[Anthony Hunt]

It's so neat to have such open and accessible feedback from a client as a site is being developed. You know you are living in a Web 2.0 world when the very site you are developing includes a live feed from a blog documenting it's making.

[Brendan]

Looking forward to the end result! :)

[Mat Morrison]

It takes a lot of effort to make something work simply.

The new Porter Novelli site won't look flashy (although we do hope it will look fresh!) All the cleverness is in the LITTLE touches - the ability to talk directly to the person whose case study it is, for example - or the ability to post local news to local office pages as well as featuring it on the home page and news archive.

What we'd like is for the site to "just work" - that things are where the user expects them to be, and that the site helps them achieve what they're looking to do, rather than gets in their way.

[Radha]

I'm excited to see the new site! It sounds like it will be very cool, with so much room for interaction between site visitors and PN staff. Also sounds like we'll have a great new platform for highlighting the work that we do!