Getting on with it - pages built

The basic pages for the 1st phase release are built.

I had to work from home to get it done though. It's been a struggle to stay focused on the Intranet build.

The daily news publishing is new and so has been taking up time plus another project's website I usually update needed to be updated and there wasn't anyone else to do it at that time (plus the other things that just sort of happen).

But anyway, they're built. They just need to be tested and the drop-down navigation needs to be done. Then I can save them as templates and more pages can be created - the build will finally start to take shape!

The build process we followed might not have been clear from the previous post so this is what happened:

• Finalise hierarchy (we just decided when to stop as the naming process which is left could go on for quite some time*).
• Decide which items are main navigation and which are secondary navigation for each level in the hierarchy.
• Sketch layouts showing different placements for the main and sub-navigation items.
• Test the layouts to see which ones people preferred.
  
• Translate the chosen layout style into a Photoshop mock-up of the web page showing design.
• Test the mock-ups by showing colour printouts to people and asking them to navigate a path through the site - I tested the chosen one on 8 people (3 of whom were quite close to the project).
• The chosen design was approved.
• The web pages were built.

*Note: The structure of this site is very different to any arrangement of this information that staff have seen before. It will take time to get used to. We know that this development process will not end once the Intranet is launched and expect some re-naming (and also re-shuffling within the sections) to take place after people have got used to the new structure.

But that's it for now, the next thing will be to test the built web pages to see if they do what people expect and that they work across browsers and at different resolutions (they have been built with this intention and have already been tested from 800x600 up to 1280x1024).

Right - stuff to do...