The Project
A company website requires updates, new pages, new promotions and new content. The ability to do this in an effective manner all depends on the way the website is built. The company’s current website allowed for easy updates, but anything new that didn’t fit within the already dozens on templates built in, required developers to build out new pages and new templates. This took time. So I took the time to mockup a site that only required one template.
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Problems
Seeing how the current site was laid out for the administrators, I took the initiative to come up with a better system that would make the content managers job just a bit easier by having one, simple, easy to use template system that they could add predesign modules to in order to make the page unique, but still follow the same look as the rest of the site. While many modern WordPress templates use similar ideas, they can be cumbersome and complicated. This aimed to make things the backend user experience more friendly.
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My Role
Much of my role was to take initiative to develop ideas without any specific assignment. I saw a potential problem and a possible solution that I wanted to present to stakeholders. Through research of possible built in solutions, and the needs of the website (both from a user and from a content manager perspective) I designed the one-template approach and a new, simpler way to lay out the website
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Proposals
This proposed to create a one-template system that would allow content creators to easily add new pages at anytime, but maintain the same style and format of the rest of the site.
The One Template would include various MODULES that can be added to any page, re-ordered, removed, or refined. The Content Managers will create a new page, and select which modules they want to use for that page from a drop down. They can add as many or as few modules as they want (some limits may be set for ease of use, efficient UI and web standards (ie only one module using H1 tags)).
These modules would each be a set design, with optional elements. This way, each page could be unique since any module can be added to any page. But since each module is designed to work together, the entire site would remain
consistent. The best part, new modules can be added as new site features emerge
without affecting the current modules or their design.
Existing modules could also be redesigned and changes would reflect globally. The module approach is also great for testing elements of the site and placement to see what users respond to best.
The Result
As goes with many proposals, sometimes the idea doesn’t line up with the company goals or budget to accomplish the idea. In this case, before I could present the idea, the company decided to go in a different direction with the site. Although it was never presented, the lessons learned from the research proved to be helpful in future projects.
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