I recently volunteered to do a small web project for a non-profit organization. I used several of my user centered design techniques, and it really does seem like using this process almost makes the site self designing. Although this will sound contradictory, i didn’t do customer interviews because the project was supposed to be a surprise and I didn’t want them to know I was working on it. Instead I imagined I did the interviews, and I created personas based on this experience. That process in itself became rather inspirational, and I promise in the future I will not cut corners like that.

Anyway, back to my original topic. I realized that once I designed the website, I wanted to be able to “hand it off” to the non-profit webmaster. Now had this organization had a fantastic website, i would probably have not been so compelled to redesign it. My dilemma was how to make the site easy to maintain once i was finished with it.

My original idea was to create a framework using ASP includes, so they would not be able to mess up the header or navigation. I brought this subject up to a peer this weekend, and he suggested that I check out Joomla. He said he uses it all the time, and it was very easy to use. I remembered seeing Joomla available from my hosting service, and I called customer service to find out that I could not use it because I use ASP hosting instead of Linux. So they recommended I check out DotNetNuke instead. After about 3-4 hours and 3 calls to customer service I finally got Dotnetnuke set up on one of my URL’s.

The application seemed relatively easy to use, and offered lots of functionality, but unfortunately the website I designed used lots of complex cascading Javascript Navigation. I ended up not using DotNetNuke for this particular project, and I will be going back to my original plan. I am glad I messed around with this application because I think that it could be very useful for making simple websites. There are also a whole array of free skins available for these type of websites.