The Existing Site
The first website was built in 1996. At that time, most websites were built with HTML
and simple graphics. This site was no exception. The navigation was implemented using
a series of icons that allowed the user to click through to each section of the site. While
clever, the icons had little intrinsic meaning and no text to explain where you would end
up if you clicked them. However, most pages had regular hyperlinks that gave the user a
better idea of what the site contained.
What was interesting about the existing site was how it had grown over time. The site
was updated fairly regularly over a seven-year period by many people with varying levels
of technical skill. The result was an extremely difficult-to-navigate website with a
remarkable amount of content. Updating sections of the site became the responsibility of
the managers that ran those areas within the business. One of the larger sections of the
site, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), was maintained by the Manager of LCA for the
Centre for Design. This section of the site had internal consistency as one person was in
charge of its content and maintenance. However, the structure of the content in the LCA
section differed from other parts of the website. The colors, navigation, and structure
were all unique to this section.
Over seven years, the existing site had become so fragmented and disjointed that even
staff within the CFD had trouble finding content. A copy of the existing site was archived
before deploying the new site using the eZ publish CMS to ensure that content would not
be lost.