Today I visited Grampians disAbility Advocacy Association who won their website in a competition. I’m driving round Victoria surveying small nonprofits’ IT needs and capabilities; I always ask who designed their website but don’t tend to get so unusual an answer.
The competition was called Full Code Press and pitted an Australian team against a New Zealand team. Team members were thrown together to design a nonprofit’s website and had only a day to plan and design it. Someone involved described it as a geek Olympics!
The New Zealanders designed the disability advocacy website and the results look impressive, it’s a clean and modern design with good use of colour and its accessibility credentials are excellent. The team made the decision to build their own content management system (CMS) in PHP. Inevitably with any product designed so quickly there were going to be bugs, many of which were fixed after launch. A year and a half later the Association has a few ongoing problems with making content edits and with a member registration form that doesn’t register members.
The other team decided to use the Drupal CMS and I wonder whether that wasn’t a better long-term solution? Support is a big issue when you commission your website, who’s going to sort out any problems that arise? There are plenty of Drupal (and Joomla and WordPress) developers out there who can help you.
The interviews with the team leaders on the Full Code Press home page are well worth a read to get some idea of how decisions are made within a creative but pressed for time web development team.
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