[webproducers] Re: Reveal actual budget in RFP?

Tom,

My compliments on writing a fine RFP but I have a comments that may
make it better. Some are trivial and some may not be:

* For design - can you provide any references to sites you like
visually and want to mimic in one or more ways? I realize it's just an
RFP but the more info a vendor has, especially for something like
design, the better. IMHO, design will be the most expensive and/or time
consuming part of this project since it affects so many aspects of the
site as a whole.

* I might have missed it but I didn't see any mention of which party
will be responsible for any content migration/entry to get the
redesigned site live. Will this be an internal project or also a
responsibility of the vendor? It's a question that will surely come up
so you might want to address that. This is a very time consuming task
and if the vendor is under the impression that its their
responsibility, you can be sure it will be reflected in the price.

* Native site search - do you have any specifics beyond just an
integrated site search feature? MySQL 4.x fully supports FULLTEXT
searching, which is very fast and efficient for large datasets,
however, as you know, there are several ways to search for content,
including:

- by pre-defined categories
- by exact phrase
- by all keywords
- by any keyword
- any of the above with modifiers such as AND OR and other clauses
- by content date

Also, you need to determine what a search return will look like - e.g.
item links, descriptive item summaries, relevancy rankings, document
type(s), number of items per a page, search page browsing (e.g.
forward/next or Google type navigation), etc.

Therefore, you may want to delve into this a bit more.

* URL generation. Many CMS systems generate non-search engine friendly
URLs. If external links from the major search engines are important to
your org, you may want to specificy that you want the system capable of
generating static, "search engine-friendly" URLs. Some packages support
this feature as standard while others can accomplish this with some
customization and some Apache mod_rewrite voodoo.

* I like the fact that you listed your basic OS and server set up.
However, since PHP performance is largely dependent on raw CPU power,
you might want to mention what kind of iron you're running on along
with server RAM. This could help a vendor pick a package/solution more
compatible with your existing hardware since some solutions are more
efficient than others.

Along the same lines, do you currently use some form of PHP caching? As
your site is going to be template based, such a system can increase the
rendering speed of your site by 2-10x and really save on bandwidth. I
use PHPAccelerator, a free caching system (not without its problems)
but last month, 38% of our site hits were cached, really speeding up
things for the users.

* You may want to separate your site functionality into two categories:
ESSENTIAL and OPTIONAL. Some CMS solutions can do pretty much
everything you need already. However, others require external modules
and/or other customization to support the features you've mentioned.

Often, there are other open source or low-cost commercial solutions
that  can accomplish some of the ancillary requirements you have. 

Since these tools usually don't need to share the same data structures
with the rest of your site to function, they might be a good
alternative in both keeping the vendor bids low and speeding up site
development time.

* You may want to clarify what user registration/authorization actually
means for your organization. In many portal and CMS models, it simply
prevents users from accomplishing certain tasks, etc. I suspect for
your purposes, it's more of an access-related feature (e.g. prevent
certain tiers of users from accessing senstive or member/subscriber
only content). Thus, you may want to elaborate a bit more on what user
registration means.

* You want to put the "background" content on your organization earlier
on in the RFP. This helps transition into the rest of the document.

* You may need to define what "related" content is. Most of the CMS
systems I've seen (sans the really pricey ones) don't support this type
of functionality as standard so the vendor may need to know a bit more
about this requirement and how it might work in practice.

* The reference to a Style Guide is key but you may want to be specific
as to what it includes since traditionally, this applies to just
graphical and code upkeep. If you're employing a full blown CMS-type
backend, the document should be expanded to a maintainence guide that
describes how to use enter content and care and feed the backend
system, etc.

Ari


--- Tom Davey <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Lee writes: 
> 
> > That said, keeping 
> > some of your budget in reserve will allow you the flexibility 
> > to deal with legitimate changes in the project.
> 
> Which is exactly what we ended up doing! 
> 
> Thanks to everybody on this excellent list who gave me such
> thoughtful
> advice. Thanks especially to Ari, whose sample RFP lent many fine
> ideas. If
> you're interested in seeing the final RFP as it is being distributed
> to
> design studios and agencies, you may get it here: 
> 
>    http://cfr.grouphub.com
> 
>    User name: redesign
>    Password: rose3bud
> 
> It's not too late to make adjustments if you have other thoughts. :-)
> 
> -- 
> Tom Davey
> New York NY USA
> tom@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
> 
>
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