NABUUR Redesign is Underway!

For those who regularly visit our Website development group it’s no surprise: the NABUUR site is being redesigned.

So far, most discussions and brainstorms have taken place within a small group of staff and volunteers, but the first screens of the new site will be visible soon.

Why this redesign?

Developing NABUUR is a continuous process. Not only new (technical) possibilities keep emerging; the actual contacts and work that take place in the villages on NABUUR also bring up new insights and lessons learned.

Last year, NABUUR was migrated from an old (XOOPS) environment, which didn’t allow further development of the platform, to Drupal, a new, state of the art environment which offers a lot of functionality. Quite a number of long awaited changes were made to the way NABUUR is organised. Due to limited time and means however, the old look and feel were mostly copied across without a proper redesign. The introduction of new features has caused pages to ‘clutter up’, making the NABUUR site not the easiest to navigate. Next to that the NABUUR site could use a fresher look and feel.

Approach

NABUUR is being redesigned through an ‘agile’ process:

– The functionality that the NABUUR site should offer is written down in ‘user stories’ that describe the experience that a certain user should have (the full set is ~50 user stories)
– Every month our team chooses the user stories that will be designed/developed that month.
– Starting with the basic functions, how futile they may seem: the signup forms were designed first
– Any user stories that are ready are implemented on http://demo.nabuur.org, where they can be seen and tested

Right now, it still looks like a fresh new Drupal site, straight from the box. But in the course of summer, bits and pieces will be added and a fresh new NABUUR will take shape. For now, click on the demo link above and take a peek at the new logo to see the new, fresher colours.

Join us in building!

We’ll need a lot of help in various ways, and love to hear if you want to get involved! Are you an experienced DRUPAL developer? Or do you want to help with testing the site? Just leave a comment and we’ll get in touch.

Stay tuned for more Redesign news, and keep track of the conversation in the Website Development group.