Using a collaborative, co-design process grounded in design justice principles, Agaric will move your website to have mobile-first design, powerful content management capabilities, and built-in accessibility. The site will continually be improved with new features, strengthened security, and more joyous experience of use.
Aproach
Agaric adheres to high standards of collaboration, communication, active client participation, and transparency.
Using design and development processes that center the people who will be affected by the website, a core team from Agaric will work closely with you to define overall goals, key outcomes, and user stories.
Through collaborative design, which will proceed iteratively throughout the project, we will identify and build a minimum viable product, and subject that to a round of feedback and further research. In this context, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, "Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose." Critically, this is research with people using the website. We then take what we learned and use that to identify and build the next minimum viable improvement.
This learning is not just for us building the site but for everyone who has a stake in success for the goals for which the site is being built. The learning covers both the website's usability and its effectiveness in reaching your goals, including effectiveness in communicating to colleagues and the general public your values and goals. Ideally, Agaric's research with you and the people who are or will be visiting the site is continuous and collaborative, constantly informing continued development.
In the steps of clarifying need and customizing the solution (leveraging state of the art open source libre software), we prefer to write and work off of user stories that clearly define the website's purpose. This helps ensure that product owners, designers, and developers are on the same page. User stories describe software functionality from the perspective of the person using the software, including motivation or benefit, such as "A visitor can ".
We use an agile methodology to prioritize with you to put critical functionality first, getting a functional website in your hands as soon as possible for review. We continue this iterative and collaborative development cycle, typically in two week sprints, always building the highest impact functionality first.
Comparative analysis
No one is doing exactly what you will do, but identifying quality peers and reviewing their respective content helps you get a wider perspective both on what potential visitors may have seen elsewhere and what seems to be working for others— we can start thinking together about where to emulate and where to differentiate, informing all aspects of building the site to achieve your goals needs.
Content strategy
Building on the review of competitors, Agaric will briefly interview people who should be interacting with your site (from content creators to potential visitors) and develop personas and user stories.
Content style guide
Along with bringing consistency to cooperative output (and saving time sweating the details every time they come up), a good content (copywriting) style guide incorporates suggestions for clear and effective writing and helps your unique aspects shine through. It can help tell your story in a consistent way and help let your individual personalities show through while maintaining collective coherence.
Agaric's content style guide has not received the dedicated attention we recommend for our clients, but can still be a useful starting point for you.
ServicesFrom our discussion and review of your goals and audiences we recommend the following services, to be provided by Agaric in collaboration with the Drutopia cooperative web platform. Our agile method allows for flexibility throughout the project.
The Drutopia initiative builds powerful website software for grassroots groups and offers a Libre Software as a Service platform to make getting a website even easier for these groups. Drutopia members benefit from the collective development and maintenance of the software and platform; currently under the aegis of a not-for-profit, Drutopia plans to grow into its own cooperative.
May First Movement Technology is a non-profit cooperative which builds movements by advancing the strategic use and collective control of technology for local struggles, global transformation, and emancipation without borders. Together, through the cooperative, members buy information technology equipment to run websites, email, email lists, and just about everything else we do on the Internet. Drutopia is hosted on May First infrastructure, and Drutopia members become May First members.
Building on and with these cooperative initiatives, Agaric can focus our energy towards custom design or development that will benefit you.
Included Features
Cutting-Edge Website Capabilities
As a member organization of Drutopia, the your website will automatically gain access to the following features:
- Configurable homepage - that include but is not limited to any of the following: prominent elevator pitch, recent news feed, featured resources, upcoming events, partner organizations list, and a list of current campaigns.
- Actions
- Campaigns
- Events
- Fundraising
- Groups
- News and/or Blog
- Profile pages
- Social media integration
- SSL (all pages on the site reachable at secure, privacy-protecting https:// URLs)
Highly Secure Internal Tools
In addition to these benefits, we recommend [membership in May First Movement Technology] and will discount your Drutopia membership by the amount of a standard organization membership in May First ($50/year). As a result of this membership, you will gain access to additional services beyond the website, including the following:
- E-mail boxes and forwards
- Webmail
- NextCloud Files and Gallery (similar to Dropbox or Google Drive)
- OnlyOffice (integrated with NextCloud for online editing of word documents and spreadsheets)
- NextCloud Calendar and Tasks
- NextCloud Contacts
- NextCloud Bookmarks and Notes
We will work closely with your team to define an effective content strategy for your website and a clean, scalable information architecture. These will result in the following deliverables:
- Website goals
- User personas
- Content style guide
- Sitemap
- Technical architecture
Building off of the content strategy and information architecture work, we will work with your team to provide a compelling a theme that speaks to your audience and reinforces your brand.
We begin with our clean, responsive theme, with the following features baked in:
- Clean - simple design that puts your content first
- Secure - covered by the Drupal security team
- Accessible - works with assistive devices and keyboard-only navigation
- Responsive - looks beautiful on any device
- Extensible - well organized templates and Sass (style sheets)
We then identify and implement the customizations that will set your website apart and best tell your story, reflecting the unique voice and tone of your organization.
Development ApproachBy leveraging Drutopia, we are able to quickly prototype with your team. After defining the information architecture we turn on all relevant features, and stub out the pages in the sitemap. We put on a collaborative training on how to work with the site and then allow your team to add content, test out the features and make note of any adjustments that would be helpful to the project.
We will then work closely together to prioritize remaining enhancements to be made to the website. Enhancements that do not make it into the initial build are added to our backlog for the Drutopia project as a whole.
Content Migration
Agaric staff will work with the you to move content from an existing website to your .
This plan will consist of manual migration work to move content from existing pages into the new website. Additionally, optional programmatic migration processes are available for moving user data and other content into Drupal. A redirect strategy will also be put in place for pages that are being culled from the old site.
Accessibility
It is critical that your site be accessible to as many people as possible, including those using screen readers. To that end, all of our work is built to support compliance with W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The WCAG Guidelines, however, are not comprehensive and so we go beyond those guidelines to ensure high accessibility. Lastly, much of what makes a site accessible happens on the content entry and management side. We will provide resources for your content team so that after the site launches, you can rest assured that what you are creating is reaching as many people as possible.
SEO
Our developers will also follow SEO best-practice development and utilize Drupal's range of SEO-related features that allow administrators to edit page titles, implement human-readable and editable URLs, enter meta tags, and more. For further SEO-related services, we can also recommend SEO consultants.
Drutopia Membership and Continuous Improvements & SupportLaunching with a site on Drutopia means more than getting all of the features and functionality Drutopia has to offer. It also means joining a platform cooperative of like-minded people. The cooperative consists of a one member one vote model and an accountable leadership team. Joining the Drutopia platform includes:
- Secure hosting with timely security updates
- The ability to request new features and endorse existing ideas
- Quarterly updates on the project
- Ability to coordinate with fellow members to crowdfund special development sprints
When joining Drutopia your site launch is not the end, but rather the beginning. Drutopia is in continual communication with all its members about what enhancements team members should work on next. Drutopia's roadmap is public to all so you know where the project is heading.
Agaric, as both your partner in maintaining your website and as a Drutopia partner, is well positioned to help see your priorities become realized.
Deliverables and BudgetContent Strategy documents
Information Architecture
Design
Development
Migrating content into a Drutopia typically takes an additional 10 to 50 hours ($1,500 to $15,000), varying
We are experts in Drupal migrations. We can move content from your old site to your Drutopia site so that you can keep working with all of your old content, all while gaining access to the flexibility and functionality of Drupal.
For a potentially much lower cost option, in four hours ($600) we can make a static archive of your old site, remove interactive features, add a link to the new site, place the old site at a subdomain, and configure your site to allow visitors looking for pages that exist on the old site but not on the new site to pass through and reach the old site.
We do not charge extra for hosting the static site.
Drutopia Membership, Hosting & Services $50/month or $500/year.
There will be no license fees for any software.
Agaric, founded in 2006, is a worker-owned web development cooperative headquartered in Boston (USA), with worker-owners also in Minneapolis and in Managua, Nicaragua. We help organizations meet their goals and strengthen the free software movement by providing consulting in online technology strategy, by building and customizing high quality software, by training people and by speaking at events. We use design justice principles to help your online presence meet your goals and make real world impact. We build with proven software that gives you power and control over your website and online presence. We use and contribute to libre software whenever possible, creative commons license our documentation, and work under an open organization model.
We look forward to creating a better website for building a better world with you!
