A fabulous dinner is best prepared by merging each dish so that everything is ready to eat at the right time. This takes some planning and ingenuity along with a confidence in your abilities to create an outstanding feast that everyone will like and talk about for a long time.

Preparing a feast is a great metaphor for building a dynamic web site and integrating a client’s social media strategy into the site building process. My partner Alain (from iAutomate) and I have prepared for our roles as head chefs by accumulating collectively over 40 years of experience in the IT and social benefit sector. Our business focuses on supporting non profits in using collaborative web platforms and online communication strategies to engage their audiences.

We clearly heard from our client that a combination of solid informative content, membership opportunities plus collaboration options were needed for this web site. All of us, client team, my partner and I put the broad brush strokes to a plan that would achieve these outcomes. Essentially we were aiming to marry the web site architecture with the social media strategy and mix in the right content to present to the public for viewing and participation.

The feast would not be possible without the right equipment. Think of our kitchen as the Drupal web platform and Open Atrium as our preparation room. In the Drupal kitchen we are able to put all our ingredients togerther in readiness for the grand opening. Open Atrium, our prep room is where master chef Alain and Brent collaborate with the sou chefs, our clients, on what the feast will look like and achieve.

Drupal is a free open source content management system (CMS) and contains core features that can be further extended by developers. Open Atrium is a Drupal extension that has become very popular in the web site development community, particularly as a means for collaboration as the site is constructed and also as a space were clients can learn how to manage their content management system. Open Atrium is demonstrating itself to be a great platform in its own right for groups of people or organizations to collaborate on issues or projects.

We have two main chefs. There is Alain who handles all the design and development requirements. Brent deals with merging and implementing the web communication strategy with the web site architecture. Then we have the client team of three dedicated staff (sous chefs) who tell us what they want their meal (content) to look and taste like. Their role is very critical as they know their audience best. They want their feast to appeal to their visitors taste, not their own. Furthermore, they want the feast to be so appealing, their users and supporters will come back for seconds and even start cooking their own dishes (collaborating). These 3 sous chefs taste the dishes as they are cooking and make suggestions to improve the final production.

So, the feast preparations are at a midway point. Before we call everyone to the table, we need to organize the content that will go in the site. To organize the contents and all the dishes, Alain and I have created a site content map that will lay out the key topic areas (dishes) that the sou chef staff have identified as the most important elements in the feast. With this site map, the content items including the most important documents, stories, calendars, and anything the sou chefs decides to be in the feast will be organized and put in their appropriate place.

This feast preparations are at a midway point. The social media strategy that will guide the communication and invitations to the guests and visitors is becoming more clear. Soon we will have agreement on the web site design. Special custom features will be created to give the site it’s unique identity. The planning and collaboration activities stored within Open Atrium are finnaly coming to fruition.

In a few weeks Alain and I will share with our readers more about how the feast is coming together. I’ve heard from other web site and social media strategists that launching a new web site is akin to a death march. We don’t like that metaphor because we believe the key to cooking great dishes and creating great web sites that work, is the positive energy that is poured into the creation and collaboration process. No doubt, mistakes will be made. Adapting and learning from these mistakes will make our feast even better. How we work through these mistakes as a collaborative team will help the sou chefs carry on after our role is complete.

In our next post we will show you our fancy cutlery, table cloth, invitation cards and some of those custom features that we expect will make our feast memorable for our clients and all their stakeholders.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of Cooking up a Collaboration Web Site with Drupal and Open Atrium in a few weeks time.

Brent Business, Learning Community, networks drupal openatrium webdesign