Yet Another Design in W3C Team
Part of Corporate
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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Karl Dubost
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- Published:
Working at W3C is an interesting experience. The Team is usually composed of 60 to 70 persons, with the possibility to edit mostly all parts of the Web site which is under cvs (thank you for giving the possibility of digging back old pages.). People from the staff have different levels of experience with regards to Web design and different perspectives.
- some people care only about information and content
- some will care about the structure
- some will have in addition a sensitivity for design
Everyone has write and read access on the content, the style, etc.
I would love to know from the Web designers/webmasters who are following this weblog, what are the techniques they used to keep the look and feel of a web site shared between multiple people with full access. Guidelines? Templates? Social Engineering? Checkers? "Use a CMS" is not the answer.
In the past, i've used templates and creating a style guide.
In the work I do, large websites have a specific role assigned to each person. This is based on what each person is best at.
From the start of a project:
All these groups communicate with each other as necessary. As examples:
By letting each person work on the thing they are best at, and to some extent control it, quality is kept high for every aspect. It also means nobody is given more work than they can handle.
Having high quality templates and good communication between all groups are the key aspects, imho. And I really like the design improvements W3C are making to areas like this blog.
yes, yes, and yes. in addition, i find that one of the most important things is to explain to the various authors what the corporate guidelines and style guides are, why they're important, and how they can implement them. regardless of any technological or managerial systems, if people don't like or understand the consistent look and feel a company is trying to portray, they'll always find a loophole or simply attempt to ignore it...which then demands convoluted QA processes to catch and rectify breaches. i remember a time when one of the major reasons for moving to a CMS in our company was "so we can lock down and control the look and feel". a CMS is not a tool of compliance to foist onto authors. and again, they'll simply try to find loopholes (e.g. starting to simply link out to other, non-CMS pages they maintain directly, or sprinkling iframes and font elements into any raw markup fields that then have to be locked down even further). so, first and foremost, people need to want to follow the CI/style.
Yes you must have people working on a site that share a common vision, and it is hard to find that but fortunately you are working at W3C and not a big commercialized company where advertisers and management want to use such and such flash application to show all the content or something. Things could be worse.
I´m wondering that all members have full access to the W3C site, especially when you said that the staff have different levels of experience. If you don´t want to use restrictions, it is necessary to make persons responsible for parts of the site, like content(parts), design, .... It is also important to have guidelines which makes it easier for new members to work with the site.