The Link – Website
Background
This project was requested to do website revamp. The website was an informative website mainly providing financial information and background information, also including basic information of each shopping malls. We investigated into the websites infrastructure and existing contents, at the same time lining up each different departments to discuss and understand about their requirements and how to make the maximum use of digital platforms to communication with the government, viewers, PR or Press, and also providing public information support to the users including tenants and landlords.
What we do
During the design and development process, there were 2 major objectives apart from the font-end design look and feel needed to be user friendly, it should be able to clearly present the contents. Moreover, “SharePoint” was requested as the foundation platform for development.
Needs
Information need to be clearly provided to the users, to avoid any confusions, the website shouldn’t include any difficult navigations. The old website could not serve the above purpose so we were there to help them to address this and become a thorough website.
End result
The whole project had lasted for approximately 1 year. We had made the launch into 3 phases with different level of release.
Phase 1 was released by the first 4 months with homepage upgrade but partial content integration to the new server.
Phase 2 had implemented 3 additional new sections into the systems to release the layouts for the front end and also for back end CMS administration system to allow user to provide their contents. Meanwhile, we continued to rename all the documents including press release, files and PDF systematically which optimized the search engine function and enhance the overall experience.
Phase 3 was fully launched with the rest of the section updates, which enhanced the website with a new search engine to perform across the whole system.
There were multiple challenges through out the whole project, but the key feature was aligning multiple parties which unique skill set and had the courage, leadership to resolve all the problems and took lead of the project.
Challenges
The main challenge was not only upgrading the creative on the outlook, but integrated the old existing server which has over millions pages of contents and press release files, systematically into the new server. At the same time, SharePoint network need to be able to work with the web part requirements and development skills.
We worked closely with the Microsoft development team together to conduct the back-end structural design, system development and etc. As a project team leader, we were acting not only as a design consultant, but at the same time acting a project consultant to align with back-end, front-end integrations, user requirement collection and research. It is because as a designer, we can easily influence the way back-end development structure.
Meanwhile, we were working closely with the Microsoft team to explore a better way to enhance the whole experience and discover additional support from other technology provider in order to resolve our clients needs.
Since many parties and departments were involved, it was a big challenge that to align all the parties with their needs and requirements and to provide them a solution to compromise all the needs. We aimed to cater all the business need, scheduling, and administrators in order to design and build the back-end CRM system to facilitate all the contents.
