Drupal.org redesign: an example of what should go into a major site

From: Kieran Lal
Date: Sep 15, 2007 6:42 AM
Subject: 200 000 user community, 30M page views/month Drupal site needs re-design estimates, recommendations for designers, IAs, graphic designers, interaction designers
To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers

Hello, I need some help coming up with a list of designers, IAs, graphic designers, interaction designer, who can help with the redesign of a very popular website. You may have heard of it:

http://drupal.org

I am trying research the costs invovled in a complete redesign of Drupal.org. All Drupal related implementation would be done by volunteers from the Drupal community but we need to get estimates on what it would cost to get the following deliverables:

Deliverables would include:
1) Audience research analysis, basically a report to the community. Functions mapped to tasks and features.
2) Concept for the site
3) Ontology - layout, sub-sites, partitioning, navigation
4) WireFrames - including interaction design
5) Photoshop designs
6) Graphic design deliverables
7) Branding

What is not going to be included in the estimate:
1) Implementation of a new theme
2) Module implementation
3) Site implementation
4) Data migration

Victor Kane suggested and elaborated:

<

blockquote>Here you should add (or it could go as part of 2 and/or 3) a list of
roles, and for each role, a list of user stories / use cases.

This is different from ontology and different from wire framing.

This gives a list of different roles and the goals they have, ie., the
value they seek in using drupal.org

This has to be defined first, then mapped to ontology (architecture)
and wireframe navigation. There is not a simple one to one
relationship here.

This would involve about 40 hours of an IA person.

2) Concept for the site

Do you mean scope? what does concept mean? If you mean scope, that
would be supplied by the definition of actors and use cases (roles and
user stories).

3) Ontology - layout, sub-sites, partitioning, navigation

Here we are getting at the architecture of the site. Another 40 hours,
fundamentally distinguishing between structural (menues) and
associative (taxonomy links, related links, content related dynamic
links) navigation. This 40 hours is for the initial architectural
prototyping and initial testing. As development continues, this model
will be refined, so that will involve additional man hours for
architect.

saludos,

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

And Angie Byron pointed out that we could and should do as much as we could to work on all the information architecture parts that we can do ourselves, and hire professionals for the last bit.

Resolution