For 33 weeks in a row at JISC I wrote my ‘weeknotes‘ – it was about the best run of blogging I have ever managed and also helped me make sense on what was going on at JISC doing a job that didn’t always make sense to me!

I’ve decided to dust off the idea but with a particular focus this time. We are [finally] about to start our web ‘refresh’ project after pretty much a year (or two depending on if you count the 1st attempt) of back and forth. A CMS has been selected, a supplier has signed on the dotted line, a migration plan has been drafted and a design refresh has been agreed.

The project has some *extremely* challenging timescales, an awful lot of dependencies and is not exactly overly resourced. All-in-all pretty much the same as usual then 🙂

My plan is to cover the project up until we launch – there will be elements I can’t blog about I would imagine but for the most part I’m sure it will be pretty transparent (though like  Joe Friday used to say “the names have been changed to protect the innocent”) the idea being that maybe some of you can learn from the pain I will inevitably suffer but also it will stand as a reminder to me not to do this again! I will try and explain some of our decision making and share mock-ups, wireframes etc as we go along.

The technology is all open source so I figure I’ll run the project in an open manner as well (hopefully it will help me write my internal update reports as well.)

We’ll count this as a kind of weeknote foreword and I’ll get started properly at the end of this first week.