Dialogo is a magazine for US Army personnel serving in 26 Latin American countries. Our project centered around the online version.
Dialogo - after
Dialogo - before
The objectives of this project were (1) to implement a content management system (CMS) for the online version of the Diálogo magazine; and (2) to enable non-technical users to manage the system and publish content as needed without significant training and acquisition of new technical skills.
drw Design was approached by another local firm to partner on this project due to our expertise in Experession Engine, the content management system that was being proposed. We assisted with putting together the request for proposal and sort of forgot about it.
Several weeks later, we were informed that our partner won the contract, and we were asked to do the implementation.
The project called for a brisk 30-day time frame to build out a site that was required to function seamlessly in English, Spanish and Portuguese, had good search funtionality, implemented a proper workflow for authors, translators and editors, handled their hundreds of photos, made all articles sendable via email, made available all the print versions of the magazines going back to 2003, plus a bunch of other requirements, including porting over their existing content.
A redesign was not part of the specification. However, about a third of the way into the project, the client mentioned that some other design firm had made them a “spiffier home page” and they were hoping it could be incorporated. To us, what they sent looked like some sort of standard Joomla template with no style whatsoever.
We ended up doing a total custom redesign, provided them with the animated elements on the homepage they really wanted and created a nice Flash-based photo gallery. We couldn't pull it all off in just 30 days, but in the end the client expressed that the extra effort significantly improved the end result.