A talk I gave at Drupal Focus on Publishing on re-launching the look.co.uk website notes on the liveblog at drupalradar.com/liveblog-relaunching-lookcouk-website
Brief overview of how we did it and how it has progressed since I’m not a designer but I did find out lots of powerpoint animations to try and make it more exciting! Stop at any point for questions!
Launched First Iteration had about 3 pages For a site which was
External agency - good at the time as no in house development time but any updates took a long time to action Unknown CMS - no dev team knowledge so couldn’t help Poor SEO - not thought about during development, URLs, duplicate content issues Cost Didn’t do what we needed - not news focussed enough
Small in house team - mixture of contract and permanent staff 3½ month build - commercial constraints to launch for Look show Agile - respond to feedback, no set requirements Sprints - 2 week cycles to be responsive
Why Drupal for business? Lots of things business looks for when chosing platforms Established - since 2001 Modular - 100’s of contributed modules Community - online, in person, meet ups - IPC goes Support - Paid if wanted (qhich business likes), Acquia (Dries) Adub (Django) Publishing - Econnomist, Turner, BBC, CNN, UN, MTV, IPC Experimental - For us anyway, first IPC internal end to end Drupal project, always want to be trying new things not getting stuck with the old
Not an agile presentation but we may be hosting an Agile in Publishing day soon so grab me after if you’re interested Big part of IPC, the way we run BAU and projects now no more Waterfall! Stand ups - communication communication communication
User stories are business not technical focussed Best analogy from Peter Brady (Lead Dev on the build) when you’re building a house you don’t build the kitchen first because when you come to build the bathroom you have to rip all the plumbing out and start again. Annoy some agile people but when you’re building from scratch you don’t want to be refactoring every week
Very important as this is what drives the url structure and the layout of the sites and it’s one thing we concentrated on from the start Not just for deleting parts of the URL though, helps Google characterise the site
Drupal is excellent for this, easily add/remove modules, try out new designs back to agile - not fixed Usability
Basic Content Types - Have to start somewhere User Admin - a site is no use if you can’t log in Taxonomy - Categorisation of content Path - SEO friendly URLs
CCK - Content Construction Kit allows you to easily produce different content types without any programming Image and ImageCache - Easy uploading, resizing and viewing of images combined with ImageCache to dyanmically resize and cache these images Views - Custom lists and queries Path Auto - Create urls based on node title GA - Build a site but need to track it!
Very little custom work to do Competitions - very important, secure data capture, integrate to back of house systems PDM/Marketing IPC - Pagination, node gallery
The two most important things to the business at launch - on time and on budget! Can’t give Drupal all the credit as In had a fantastic team working on the project and full editorial support Fast - very, very quick Doubled page impressions in the first hour Number one for fashion - we can claim this as that’s where we are in Google, part down to
Every site has bugs when you launch but agile lets you solve that Performance - no master slave replication this makes sysadmin unhappy and then they pester me - don’t know if you’ve been on the receiving end of a sysadmin on call but it’s not fun Rather than reinvent the wheel we just installed pressflow and it comes out of the box Cache router issues - form caching problems, APC - went to community for help and found answer
Editorial love it Developers like it but mindset change - can’t just drop any developer in to it, either bring in Druapl expereince but be careful!
Bricks are great for building houses but you wouldn’t build a boat out of them
![Relaunching The Look.co.uk Website ,[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/relaunchingthelook-co-ukwebsite-100817131109-phpapp01/85/Relaunching-the-look-co-uk-website-1-320.jpg)
