Finishing Touches to ACATonline - End of Round One?

We are currently working through the finishing touches to the new ACATonline website upgrade. As with many things this has been a deceptively extensive process. Our main task had been to rationalise a whole host of "bolted on" developments that we had made over the past 7 years or so, and then to roll out a set of site function enhancements that had been identified with our client.

Most of the key changes are now made, and the new systems written, including enhanced document search and archiving, rolling out a training system across all training courses, improved administration functions and reporting, as well as a thorough tidy up of the design to make it visually more coherent, and accessible.

The time-consuming part that we`re stuck into at the moment is getting all the pages tested and performing properly for the many categories of visitor, from the general public to the Administration team at ACAT, that will be using the site. There are no shortcuts to doing these tests, we`re simply working through a long spreadsheet checking off each option in turn. Once our run-through is done there will be a short test period with real users getting access to the new site and trying it out for usability mainly, but also to see if we`ve missed any bugs.

As with all updates we`ve also thrown up a host of new projects along the way that will be delivered in a phase 2 upgrade for the site. Quite simply what has happened is by getting from A to B our client has realised that they could also get to C,D,E...Z too and would like us to make that happen! We`re now looking forward to the end of the test phase and getting the site live as soon as we can so we can get stuck into round 2!

Published: 15-03-07 at 09:00 by Jon Sloper