We've officially started .. really

I've been hesitating before writing on this blog.

As Web Manager for the BBC's College of Journalism website I have the responsibility of turning editor Kevin Marsh's vision of a public facing learning facility for BBC journalists and journalists across the world into a reality.

In practise that means getting the designers in with their pots of paint and chaining a handful of technical staff to their desks. Their goal is simple. Make us a website.

Simple, isn't it? Come up with some page designs and code them up for us. We'll put them into Movable Type and we'll (magically) do the rest.

That's what all good producers and project managers do, you see. We simplify things so that we can handle the idea better. Large scale projects with multiple stakeholders and a ridiculously large budget are always made easier to consider in the early hours of the morning if they're reduced to bite-sized chunks (although I might add that this project doesn't have either). Sometimes we simplify things so very much we're left wondering whether there's any work to do at all.

In truth, there are relatively straightforward elements to making the College website public. The site is already rich with content, content crafted by people who have enormous amounts of knowledge and experience gained over many years in the journalism trade.

Such is the amount of experience and knowledge to be shared, the site currently residing on the BBC's internal network is vast. It's grown larger than the original scope of the project and thus it is, in places, a little unwieldly.

Consequently, what feels like the majority of the intensive work required in making the site public has already been completed. Over the past couple of weeks, Kevin, myself and Information Architect Rachel have locked ourselves away in a meeting room with nothing more than large pieces of paper, big fat marker pens and post-it notes. We've discussed, debated, postulated and pontificated. From time to time we've stood around the circular table in the middle of the room as though we're planning an invasion.

The output (those of us with a project manager background love 'inputs' and 'outputs') has been impressive: a revised architecture, a strict set of mandatory tags, a stripped down set of categories and an all important set of rules for when we publish publically.

It was the results of our discussions we offered up to our designers and coders this afternoon for their consideration. During that meeting I saw a great deal of note-taking, not to mention a great deal of "So, just to confirm .. you want it to do this?" Such things are encouraging and reassuring.

Websites get launched every single day, an increasing number of them utilising Movable Type as the publishing platform. Still it excites me to think that we are now underway.

This ship has set sail. And it shouldn't be long before it docks in port.