Web Project Scheduling Guidelines
The time requirements listed herein do not reflect the amount of time required to make a change–they reflect the scheduling constraints imposed by the need to juggle many simultaneous projects with different priorities and time requirements. The rule is: “first come, first served.”
The following requests may be made directly to the NPPA Information Technology Staff:
- Web changes that involve simply posting new copy for already-designed-and-existing pages should be sent with 3 business days' notice.
The following requests must be made to the Executive Director, and copied to the NPPA Information Technology Staff:
- Web changes that involve creating new pages within an existing framework, or adding material that requires new development within an existing framework (such as event registration forms), extensive layout (such as tables of winners, or stories with significant numbers of pictures) should be sent with 5 business days' (1 week's) notice.
- Web changes that involve modifications or extensions of the page's visual design (such as a static image gallery or a new layout for a subsection of the site) should be sent with two weeks' notice.
- Web changes that involve new functionality should be sent with two months notice.
Changes that fall into more than one category (such as an event changing its visual design and adding online registration) should be sent with additional notice.
Note: some changes to the site may be set aside as impractical.
Further Notes
- During especially busy seasons (such as December–March), lead times may need to be extended. As a rule of thumb, you should figure on multiplying the lead time by 2.
- These times are approximate, and some desired features may not be practical. The staff is limited in number and reserves the right to allocate its time.
- The recommended notice for a web site addition or change need not require that all the material be available at the start of the request period—for example, the BOP Still Winners gallery (which falls in the "needs at least 2 weeks notice" category) was scheduled more than a month ahead, but the pages were posted within a few days of the end of judging, because the design and testing work was all done in advance, before the start of judging.
Again, this is notice required for scheduling and planning the project, not necessarily for implementation.
- Sending material in HTML will probably not decrease the needed lead time, unless said HTML is coded to the technical specifications of (and using the stylesheet for) the web site. We're using valid structural XHTML and CSS 2 on the site, and we have fairly strict browser compatibility requirements.
If you want to pursue this option, see the NPPA Web Page Design Guidelines for details about the site's technical specifications.
In particular, don't send a web page generated from Word. It's actually less work to build a page from scratch than to clean up Word-generated HTML.
