ADL Technology

The Challenge

I had been speaking with ADL’s management for a number of months about redeveloping their website.  Not only did it need to look more professional, it needed a better home.  The site needed more customization and extensibility than its existing templating system permitted.  In mid march, the project kicked into high gear; a management initiative meant that a new, improved website was needed in less than one month.

The Process

Typically a website redesign takes at least 3-4 months.   Why?  A site has many elements to consider and it just takes time to map out the site’s content, create a design, gather the contents, get approval, secure the site, proof and then go live.   I often compare a website to building a house.  You want to make sure the plans are correct, you obtain the right materials and you build things correctly so you can live with and enjoy the results.   Usually doing this well takes time.  An even simpler analogy is which is better instant coffee or good old-fashioned brewed, percolated coffee.

The Solution

After creating a very tight, 3 week, detailed timeline and responsibility list, a joint ADL/Link to Visibility team dove into the project.  Due to the short length of the project; the number of pages was limited to the homepage, a core set of 5 main content pages with 4 additional pages for things such as privacy statements, form thank you, and location information.

Daily project meetings were held to enable decisions about design issues such as

• color schemes
• templates and design
• image selection
• text rewrites and editing
• revisions and approval

Everyone agreed that the existing colour scheme was too bright and some of the images were a little cartoony, so Our first challenge was picking a colour scheme that would permit some use of current branding elements but provide the basis of a more sophisticated design.  Colour scheme selected, the ADL Team picked a first and second template choice from a carefully selected group of options that met key criteria of being flexible, customizable, and extensible.

With the basic design elements selected, Link to Visibility began executing the design work and the ADL Staff  worked on content.   Since individual page design relied to some extent on the content, Link to Visibility pitched in and wrote content for Lean Processes and Quality sections.  This extra work was in addition to agreed upon tasks of revamping some process diagrams, image selection and picture editing.  What was great about the project was we created a team and a great web site in a very short amount of time, in large part because everyone just jumped in and did what was needed.

Visit ADL’s new site at: https://www.adltech.com or browse through a few screen shots as shown below.