Best Practices - Building a new web site with the help of SharedStatus

In this series of blog posts we would like to give you some working examples of how to leverage SharedStatus to help you in real world environments. This post will focus on using SharedStatus to help build a new web site.

The first step is to create a project to hold your work. From the main SharedStatus Dashboard click Create a project, then enter the name for the new web site (Spring 2011 Website Refresh for example) and a description.

We're going to include how we want people to use the labels to help keep track of things so for now leave the description blank; we'll return to it after the next few steps.

Labeling Items In Your Project
Next we will add our labels. The labels are important because they will help you organize your project and better understand what needs to be done. The power of labels are that more than one can be applied to an item and they can easily be added or removed as you progress through your project.

• Requirements: this label will be used for messages and tasks that contain actual requirements for the web site, usually from the stakeholders.
• Feedback Needed: this label will be applied to items as people on the design team create content they want others on the team to provide feedback on. After enough feedback has been received (usually on a message that may include a screen shot or page content, though sometimes a task) the author of that item can remove the Feedback Needed label.
• Final: this label is applied to a message, task or file that contains a final decision—either in the item itself or comments within it—that identifies final art, content or key decisions that have been made.
• Site Bug: this label is applied as the web site is placed in a production or staging area. As users find problems with the site they can apply this label to tasks requiring attention by the person responsible for fixing them. If your web site and development team is large and complex you may want to add additional labels for content, layout, scripting, artwork, etc.
• Design Sample: this label can be applied to designs that have been created, often in the form of screen shots.
• Research: This label can be applied to messages that contain links to interesting sites your stakeholders find. They could be competitors or sites that contain design elements you want people to reference later.

Update the Description
With the labels defined you can update the description to reflect how you want people to use the project. This description will appear for users in the project overview and is how you tell them you want them to use the project.

Note: SharedStatus supports Textile formatting (as well as HTML if you are comfortable with that) in the project description so the following example contains tags to make the description look nice to your team members. Copy and paste this into the project description then edit as appropriate:

Welcome to the new website project! This project will be used by everyone on the web site design team. The team will consist of internal team members and outside contractors.

The following labels have been defined and should be used as appropriate:

*Requirements:* Use this label on any items that contain requirements for the web site.

*Feedback Needed:* Apply this label to any item that you want other team members to provide feedback on. Once you have received adequate feedback _please remove the label_.

*Final:* Apply when a task, message or file contains a design or content that has been approved and may need to be referenced later.

*Site Bug:* When you find a bug on the site (layout, content, etc) create a task and apply the Site Bug label to it. Summarize the bug in the task name, then provide any details needed to recreate the problem, especially if it is browser specific. The project manager will later go through and assign the task to the appropriate team member.

*Design Sample:* Apply this label to all designs for artwork, font selection, etc.

*Research:* If you find an interesting site you think others would like to use as a reference for a design element, color scheme, fonts, etc. create a message that contains a link to the site and apply this label to it.

We will be actively using the chatroom for this project so please feel free to stop by at any time.

Invite People
With the project set up complete it's time to invite people into the project. Make sure you cover everyone that has a stake in the web site to join, not just people on your marketing and technical teams. Product managers, sales, support, customer service and executive groups—among others—should be included, even if you wait until further into the project life cycle to add them.

Also, be sure to include any external resources that may need access to this project. One of the more powerful features of SharedStatus is that it's easy to include people from outside of your organization to specific projects.

Setting Milestones
Once the people are in place you can set some high level milestones for your web site. Some milestones could be:

• Requirements From All Stakeholders: make sure everyone that has something they need the web site to do has had their requirements submitted.
• First Pass Design Samples: A skeleton for the web site has been completed and the team has reviewed and approved it.
• Site Design Finalized: The web site design, artwork and stubs for content have been approved and completed.
• Site Complete: The site is complete, content and all, and testing has verified the site is ready. All that's left is deploying it.
• Site Deployed: The site has been deployed into your production environment.

These milestones may have dates that are well defined up front or may be changed as you progress, it's entirely up to the management style you want to embrace. Milestones are optional but can help you become more structured in hitting your objectives.

Leveraging the Message Area
The message area of you project can be very helpful in letting you discuss high level issues in the beginning of your project, letting the designers ask questions of the stakeholders and vice a versa, as well as capturing things like external news events and competitive data that may impact the site.

Creating Tasks
Task assignment is where the power of SharedStatus really comes through. You don't have to limit the ability to assign tasks to just the manager of the project. Anyone on the project team can create a task and assign it to someone else on the team.

In the early stages of the project many of the tasks will revolve around requirements gathering from each of your stakeholders. A good solution for the requirements gathering portion is to create tasks for each stakeholder, soliciting their requirements by a specific date. Apply the Requirements label on these tasks and you can quickly see the state of your requirements by entering the Task list and selecting the Requirements label. Open and completed requirements will be listed there.

Once you move on to the design phase, assign tasks to your designers and site architects for the actual site design elements. As they complete their designs they can put them into a message (with either a link or attached screen shot) and the Feedback Needed label applied. The project manager can then create tasks for each of the stakeholders asking them to provide their feedback on any of the designs that concern them. Once the stakeholders have submitted their feedback and marked their tasks complete you can either repeat that process or move on to final building and the move into the production environment.

The beauty of SharedStatus is that you can handle your project however you want. You can structure the use of labels, tasks and messages as we have in this example or you can simply create tasks for people in your project and move on.

It's up to you!