Back to Basics

Flash. AJAX Slideshows. Rich Media. Web 2.0. All these buzzwords in website development can make it easy to get caught up in building fancy features on a new site. My experience with web development projects this week highlighted the importance of focusing on the basics of building a web platform. Are the resources to create and skills to manage extravagant sites available? Can the target audience even download it? Working on a pair of projects this week with NDItech partners we focused on the importance of iterative development. While we expect the groups with which we're working are going to get more sophisticated websites down the road it doesn’t have to be in the first iteration; after all, like Rome, good websites are not built in a day. Example: NDI is working with the Liberian Legislature on a tech modernization project, one aspect of which is a web communications platform; they have nothing currently. Our end goal is to have a website that provides information to citizens about their representatives, the legislative process, modernization plans, votes, news, calendars, audio of sessions and more. In time the website will have all of these components, but to bring it live we are taking it step by step. For now our main priority has been to import the names of the members of the Legislature, their contact information, committees, and bills passed this session. This will allow people to know who their representatives are, how to contact them, the committees that are in place, and the work these legislators have done. It's not everything one can imagine, but it will be vastly more information than Liberian citizens currently have access to, and it's something that staff in the Legislature can manage themselves. When brainstorming on building a new website, we try to focus on the type of content that will match the target audience’s interests and information needs. It's important to remember that pages that are more ornate are not intrinsically more effective - it's all about the content. We're starting small, triaging the most important information gaps, and building on from there. In time the website will grow to match the Legislature's increasing capabilities and need for information - and staff in the Capitol will have learned how to adapt and improve the system themselves.