The Web Project Planner
by Kerri A. Hicks
In developing our web projects, we work hard to strike a balance between the technical (programming, information architecture, database architecture, etc.), the experiential/ergonomic (graphics design, accessibility, usability), and the content/context (data, writings, multimedia assets). The people we work with generally come to us with a vast, deep knowledge of their content/context, some ideas about experience, and little understanding of the technical aspects, while we tend to come from the other end -- we're technologists who know about the humanities, while they're humanists who are exploring the use of technology.
In the various stages of our projects, all the people involved end up educating one another -- we may learn a great deal about the Civil Rights movement or writing Devanagari script -- while the people we're working with learn a great deal about using the web, normalizing data, and other technical aspects.
The challenge often comes in translating from humanism to technology. What a technologist considers 'data' (normalized, predictable, machine-readable) may be very different than the 'data' that exists for humanities research (pictures with provenance information written on the back, names that may have several different spellings, varying methods of date accounting). Keeping track of what all parties learn and come to agreement on can be a daunting task, whether it's what colors or fonts we plan to use on a web page, to what XML elements we decide to include in our DTDs, to the specific search protocols we want to implement.
While tracking and documenting these decisions is critical to the success of a project, sometimes it's challenging to bring all those discussions and decisions out of a meeting, and put them into practice. I created this planner to address that issue. It's a tool to be used at the user's discretion -- that is, only use the pages you want to use, don't feel that you have to fill everything out. Put the pages in a binder, and bring that binder to your meetings, so when you decide on a color, a page that should link to another, a data structure, or anything else, it's written down (much faster than trying to type up notes on a laptop, or writing notes in a general notebook and then transcribing them into the project later). Also, meetings can be documented, and then completed with action items that all attendees agree on and understand.
The Web Project Planner [150k pdf]
Print out whichever pages you need. Perhaps you won't need style information, but you have regular meetings, so will need no style page, but many meeting pages. Think of the document as a flexible tool -- use what you need, and don't bother with what you don't. Don't fill it out just for the sake of it (unless you want to!). Tote it around, sketch layouts, and let me know if you have any suggestions for changes or additions.