NBR website building: lessons learned

Most project coordination problems happen when one side knows what they want and the other side thinks they know what the other want – but in reality wires are horribly crossed. Cue the yelling.

NBR publisher Todd Scott isn’t a website designer or developer, and he knows it. He also knows that the people in these professions deserve some reverence when they have ideas.

Most people are good at what they do, Mr Scott says, and often the best results arise when they’re given creative responsibility of a project that the people paying the bills know little about.

So, unusually for an internet media project, the creative concepts for the new NBR site upgrade were made by the website creators at Sparks Interactive, not the publishing house.

That’s not an easy decision to make when the survival of a business depends on the product being timely, useful, relevant news that people can use and, more importantly, doesn’t break down.

Sparks Interactive senior interactive producer Hayden Judd says directing the upgrade process creatively from the very beginning was an immensely enjoyable ride.

“The teams were quite involved in the creation because we’ve been given a responsibility for the design function. It’s meant a lot to us because the guys have cared about this project.

“We know how these situations work. And we had this strategy with top-shelf design thinking. We thought we were going to get pegged back on a few areas but we still thought the ideas were great. Then to present most of those and hear, ‘yup let’s do it’, to be honest we were a bit shell-shocked for a while but very excited.”

Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, as a wall-climbing superhero’s uncle once said. All of Sparks Interactive’s ideas were top-shelf, as they said, and NBR required not just a promise but the execution of those tough concepts.

According to Mr Judd, NBR wasn’t exactly “upgraded” – at least in the colloquial way of tacking new systems on to an existing structure.

The whole site was migrated to an entirely different digital foundation which the Sparks Interactive design team chose for its fluidity and breadth of future programming possibilities.

“One of the bugbears for us at NBR was there was no real way to speed the site up. So we’ve said, ‘this thing here works well with this and this and in that order.’ We haven’t customised any of these modules so, when new versions come out, the code can be replaced, which is really exciting for us.

“The hardest thing was rebuilding everything we’ve done. So we haven’t reused anything. Now it all works in harmony,” Mr Judd says.

Sparks Interactive spent three months alone on migrating the data from the old site to the new platform. That’s a lot of data. Yet actually testing the functionality of the new website was nerve-wracking because NBR “works under load,” Mr Judd says.

“With a lot of the issues we have to generate tests by putting the servers under artificial load to see how the queries run. Those are the things that lose us sleep before a launch.

“But you have to be sure of what you’ve built. And that’s the big feeling we’ve had coming through the whole project. We’ve done everything ground up, piece-by-piece, in a generous amount of time over the year.

“I feel proud of the site. We weren’t just given a mandate which we strictly followed. We were asked, “What would you do? What would Sparks do for this?” Mr Judd says.

nsmith@nbr.co.nz

Feedback on NBR ONLINE's upgrade is welcome. Email us at customerservices@nbr.co.nz.

This artice was part of NBR's November 14 edition special feature on ICT trends for 2015. See the full feature here (note: those with print and online subcriptions get immediate access to the print edition online. Print subscribers gain access on a week's delay).