[consulting] Estimation-Blowout case-studies wanted

[George D. DeMet]

Ashraf Amayreh wrote:
> Has anyone faced this problem? How do you begin to tackle it? What do 
> you do when the client wants the design to come out from his side and 
> you know the deisnger will totally be someone unacquainted with 
> Drupal? And in some cases I faced, not acquainted with web development!
I actually covered many of these issues in my "Dos and Don'ts of 
Designing for Drupal" session at Drupalcon Szeged.

Without exception, the key to success when working with outside 
designers is to be as open and transparent as possible, both with the 
designer and the end client, and to raise potential issues as early as 
possible in the process before actual development begins.  If you're 
able to forge those relationships early, it will save you a lot of pain 
later on. 

On projects where we've worked with a design partner before, it's 
usually pretty easy to estimate how much time it will take to implement 
their designs given the scope of the project.  Also, if we already have 
a positive working relationship with the designer, we know that they'll 
be amenable to making small changes that will make their designs much 
more "Drupal-friendly" and take a lot less time to develop.

When working on projects with a design partner who you've never worked 
with before, you'll want to make sure that you budget enough time to 
completely deconstruct the concepts they provide and figure out how 
you're going to execute them in Drupal before you start sitebuilding.  
One way that we do this is to take the design concepts and them mark 
them up (either on paper or in PDF format) with notes that explain the 
functionality of the design both in plain English and "Drupalese".  
Generally speaking, this usually takes about 120% of the time that we 
would take if we were designing the site ourselves.

Working with someone else's design concepts almost always takes more 
time than designing a site in-house, but it can often bring a lot of 
value to the client in terms of maintaining consistent branding and 
identity across both print and electronic communications.  And the 
challenge is often rewarding, too - many of the contributions we've made 
to the Drupal community came out of having to implement someone else's 
"crazy" designs.

-- 
George D. DeMet
Palantir.net
2211 North Elston Suite 202
Chicago IL 60614
p 773.645.4100 x306
f 773.645.4105