Project management

26 November 2009

Redeveloping the corporate website for the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) – was indeed a rewarding challenge. Situated within the corporate communications team, this role involved:

• project managing an external design agency
• devising the bespoke content management system (CMS) features, functionality and access permissions
• analysing an organisation in the midst of refocusing their priorities to create a new site architecture
• initiating and driving an inhouse content audit of the existing website (10,000+ pages)
• developing the corporate web strategy as well as content strategy for each of the new areas of the site and briefing inhouse writers
• interaction and graphic design (ie. wireframes and design of home page and level 2 pages) and image manipulation (banners) to hone corporate communications
• supervise content migration performed by web executive, QAing, training
• bug fixing, adding to and maintaining issues log (Basecamp) and QA of work developed by the agency
• coordinate and supervise the website go live with both internal staff (domain switch for the old site from www.seeda.co.uk to www.seeda.org.uk) and the agency
• suggest and trial further web 2.0 enhancements to widen press distribution and proactive PR
• prepare phase 2 development plan including further enhancements to the CMS and known issues to be resolved

Whilst undertaking these duties, I also maintained the existing (now the old) website:

• processing content updates to ensure correct formatting and instructions before sending off to external web host to implement
• devising improvements to the site, ie. RSS feeds, templates for the publishing of information eg. Economic Snapshots and Labour Market Updates and a contact form to reduce spam
• sub-editing content and writing new content where necessary
• formatting text into templates for PDF downloads (ie. downloadable media releases)
• image manipulation
• monitoring microsites with a view to migrating static sites to the new site infrastructure
• monitor information for adherence to information privacy / data protection policies and seek guidance from inhouse data protection officers where necessary
• devising style guidelines for page formatting in preparation for the implementation on the new website
• working with Business Link stakeholders to identify content for the business portal (www.businesslink.gov.uk/southeast)

To faciliate communication for a number of internal stakeholder groups, I created blogs and instructional notes for their use:

eg. Low Carbon Regional Leadership Group

I am proud of the work I achieved in this role and I received positive feedback from staff and external stakeholders.