Abstract Latina magazine ranks #1 in advertising among all Hispanic publications and the website accounts for a major chunk of the publisher's revenue. My company originally rebuilt the site in 2008 but that was mostly a face lift. In 2010 we rebuilt the entire thing. The site was redesigned, the CMS received a major upgrade and the data was reconfigured to work in the new system. Since I'm not a database specialist my team handled the heavy lifting. I cracked the whip and made sure the project was delivered in working order and on time.

Client request A new and improved site that looks better and is easier to use and maintain

What I did Client interfacing, project management, quality control

Directives

1. Oversee redesign
2. Upgrade content management system
3. Change site taxonomy and migrate data

Solutions

The redesign was done in-house. My input was minimal. The main issue here was making sure my team and the in-house team were in the proper position to work together and stay on schedule. This was harder than it sounds because during this time we were also launching Kidult, which was the culmination of a seven-month project. Despite the tight schedule, I was able to get everyone to play nice together in the sandbox and we delivered the new website to kick off the new decade.

The infrastructure was breaking down and this caused continuous problems for the edit staff and the tech department. The site was built using an early version of Drupal 5 so an upgrade to Drupal 6 was in order. Making the infrastructure more reliable saved the client a significant amount of time and money.

Along with the graphic redesign the content categories also needed to be reconfigured. For example, in the old site the Beauty category had one sub-category for Hair & Nails. In the new site Hair and Nails are separate sub-categories. Database migration is a big deal in and of itself. In this case, the data also had to be manipulated so content that was assigned to categories that no longer exist would render in new categories. It was a difficult undertaking but finding content in the new site is much easier and that makes the site more useful and relevant to the target audience.