Fwd: Re: Top-level description of Website redesign project; draft RFP

Forwarded to our new public list with permission.

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: fantasai <fantasai@inkedblade.net>
> Subject: Re: Now due before 3 November - Re: Top-level description of Website redesign project; draft RFP
> Date: 24 October 2019 at 21:46:53 CEST
> To: Coralie Mercier <coralie@w3.org>, […]
> Archived-At: <https://www.w3.org/mid/71f43fc4-0f44-69c3-51d8-60387919a954@inkedblade.net>
> Message-Id: <71f43fc4-0f44-69c3-51d8-60387919a954@inkedblade.net>
> 
> On 10/24/19 7:00 AM, Coralie Mercier wrote:
>> Hi Team, AB,
>> Please note that team + AB input is now due before Monday November 3.
> 
> Hi Coralie,
> Here are some initial comments:
> 
> 1. If this project isn't open to collecting feedback from the community continuously, you run the risk of launching into a lot of problems. So I don't advise restricting this project to the Team until launch. I think you should find an agency that is willing to work in the open: to publish and explain their work as it is completed in phases and collect and accept feedback from the W3C community, so that when we launch everyone is on the same page and nothing catches us by surprise.
> 
> 2. Wrt the CMS, we need something that is long-lived and easy to maintain, because we run our systems for decades, not years only as other sites do. That probably means it needs to be open source, and that it needs to either be simple enough for systeam to maintain if its community dies, or have a strong enough community that we expect it to still exist 10-15 years from now.*
> 
> 3. We need to enable collaborative editing. Many parts of the site are maintained only by the Team, but some parts are maintained by WGs and some parts (e.g. /Guide) should be maintained by the collaboration of interested individuals across the organization that don't correspond to a well-defined group.
> 
> 4. I would not include the WG pages in Phase I, except insofar as they're considered in the visual design work: there is massive amounts of content in some of them (e.g. i18n, a11y), each WG currently has its own organization, and many are outdated enough that they require rewriting. Recreating and updating all of these into a standard template is a lot of work, may or may not be appropriate, and I think trying to include it will hold back the launch of the more general parts of the site.
> 
> 5. Wrt visual design, I don't think we have the expertise in-house to do this, so this should definitely be one of the outsourced tasks. Bert and Tanya can have oversight and code review on this, to make sure that the results adhere to the level of quality we require, but to be clear, we should not be asking them to do the work themselves.
> 
> 6. I strongly advise you to ask Jen Simmons and Rachel Andrew to be involved during the process of choosing an agency. They know the industry far better than any of us do, and they can help you choose a good partner.
> 
> ~fantasai
> 
> * My suggestion here would be to seriously consider building static files here, backed by one or more git repos, building on the filesystem rather than a complicated dynamic CMS that has its own notion of objects and metadata. Our content is not particularly dynamic, static generation is much simpler to tweak and maintain, it can hook into Apache's content and language negotiation features which we are already using in multiple places, it can easily accommodate existing content which will allow us to incrementally migrate pages over, and it has the best performance. Collaboration can be handled through GH, which most of our community is already familiar with, and git will take care of archiving much better than any CMS system. But that's something for the Team and the agency to evaluate together.

--
Coralie Mercier  -  W3C Marketing & Communications -  https://www.w3.org
mailto:coralie@w3.org +337 810 795 22 https://www.w3.org/People/Coralie/