After fridays’ talks comes mondays work. A lot of work. Sometimes we need the help of external partners. One of them is Thomas. He is a freelancer, caring especially for content management and databases.
First describe yourself - what’s your job especially in the relaunch?
Currently I’m working out a concept on a new content management system - to provide and manage the descriptive content and get it together with the interactive elements of the spreadshirt website. We want to make the content more accessible for the users (e.g. clean up the structures, implementing a powerful search, creating a better FAQ), the content management and the internationalisation process much easier for ourselves, the website faster and so on. I was responsible for the implementation of the first content management system around 3 years ago so I have some experience in that field.
So your task is to synchronize the front-end (the things one can see) with the databases running in the background, right?
Yeah, almost. The job is to build a system to create menus/pages, fill the pages with descriptive content (e.g. a news article) or integrate interactive functions (e.g. something of the partner area) and provide the content in the front-end. The refactoring of the partner area admin (where you can manage your products) will be done by other teams.
How is the workflow with the other departments?
The other departments did a very fast job. Thanks again! As usual they defined long lists of requirements, usecases and feature wishes ;o)
What was the most challenging task that had to be solved?
At the moment, the biggest challenge is to define the structure and functionality of the system. We want to fit the needs of the marketing guys, the content managers, the editors, translators and the graphic designers and have a very flexible system to structure our page and the content. On the other hand we want to keep it simple. I love this kind of crucial tasks.
What kind of feature in the relaunch do you like best?
Not sure, what I can blab here. I like that we wanna have nice short speaking urls and get rid of the endless parameters, so that everybody can have an idea of the content before he clicks on a link.
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