We’ve recently completed two very challenging, large scale projects: Jobfinderusa.com and The Foundation for International Education (FIE). The FIE site was a redesign of an existing site that had outgrown its existing content management system and jobfinderusa.com was a custom built online application. We carefully evaluated the needs of each customer and decided upon two very different approaches.
The FIE project was mostly a problem of organization and data management. We’re big fans of the ExpressionEngine CMS and found that it had all the features we needed for FIE built in. ExpressionEngine geeks might be interested to note some of the modules we added: Solspace’s Freeform and Mark Huot’s brilliant Pages module. Not only does Pages allow FIE staff to easily find and edit static page text, but it makes creating a site map a breeze.
The main obstacle in the FIE project was the organization of data. Our primary contact on the project, Emma Jones, took the bull by the horns and created a comprehensive outline of the FIE content. Without this roadmap, the project would have been a complete failure. Only an FIE insider could have provided this crucial piece of the puzzle and the success and accolades the site has been receiving are probably much more a credit to Emma’s ability to organize than our ability to design and code websites.
The Jobfinderusa.com site was a completely different beast. Prism Publishing attempted to create the site with another developer but made very little progress after several months. We began working with Guillermo Haas-Thompson and assembled our proposal from his carefully crafted request for proposal. The scope of a large project like Jobfinderusa.com can be difficult to define, however, and it was inevitable that some “scope creep” would come into play. We knew from the beginning (the RFP actually used the term “fuzzy stuff") that there would be a certain amount of redevelopment on the fly.
That’s where Ruby on Rails came to the rescue. We’ve been using Ruby for custom application development for the last two years and have been amazed at the ease in which one can change direction when needed. ROR has often been described as “agile” and we could have never launched this site without that agility. A website is never truly finished — we’ve already made significant modifications to the admin functions — but making these tweaks and modifications feels more like a refinement of an already good recipe with Rails.
In the end, neither of these projects would have been a success without responsible, dedicated contacts with our clients. Imp Designs believes that all successful design is collaborative and without the assistance and contributions of Emma and Guillermo these projects would have never been completed.