Any advice on switching to a new design in Site Manager?

At St Andrews we’re currently working on a design tweak of the main University website which will involve completely new XHTML and CSS code for the page styles.

While we’re currently focusing on getting the code right, the issue will soon arise as to how we manage the migration within SiteManager to the new code: swapping out old styles for new.

Where we are

Having lived with the current design and code for the last year (we launched the new architecture and design on 10 May 2007) we’ve been seeking feedback from staff and students about what works, what doesn’t work, what new features would folks like to see implemented.

Based on those conversations we’re currently working on a few tweaks, redesigning the current staff and student home pages as well as the main University homepage, and building the site using the Blueprint CSS framework, which is both making writing cross-browser compatible code a doddle, and allowing us a greater degree of flexibility than without using a grid-based framework. (Interestingly the May 2008 issue of .net magazine has a cover story feature on designing with grids.)

Any advice?

Once the code is done we’ll obviously need to plug it into SiteManager, do some testing and go live.

What we were wondering was whether anyone out there in the blogosphere has had any experience switching website ‘themes’ in Site Manager. Any tips, hints, advice that you’d like to share?

• Anything that you wish you’d done better?
• Anything that worked particularly well?
• How did you go about testing the new design in SiteManager?

I’d really like to hear from you, either as a comment on the blog or you can contact me via the Web Team page.

Gareth J M Saunders,
University of St Andrews

Update

Shortly after publishing this post I received an email from T4 with a PDF attachment of a document called “Implement a New Design” which covers exactly the issue that I blogged about: applying a new design to an existing site within SiteManager.

They suggest three options:

1. Create a new channel on the existing site structure/content
   This is useful if you just need to update the design and not the structure.  This way you can keep working on your existing site/design while getting the new design right by publishing it out to a separate test environment.
2. Create a new channel on a duplicate of the site structure/content
   This is the option if you need to re-architect the site structure as well as change the design.
3. Create a new channel on a new site structure/content
   With this option you are effectively creating a brand new website from scratch.