niksilver.com

…which looked like this:

• October 2005: Start detailed planning of Travel section. Involved about 12 people from Guardian and ThoughtWorks. Much preparation needs to take place before work can begin.
• February 2006: Start building the Travel section, initially focusing on the servers, development environment and build pipeline.
• May 2006: Launch first visible item on Travel section, a keyword component.
• November 2006: Launch entire Travel section. From a technical standpoint it was then the biggest single launch in the website’s history, and one of the smoothest then known.
• January 2007: Start planning phase two. Involved around 20 people fulltime for six weeks, but sufficient clarity was achieved after three weeks to start one stream of work then.
• May 2007: Launch new guardian.co.uk home page. Within hours of the launch, Tony Blair obligingly announces his resignation as prime minister, allowing us to make full use of our flexible templates as the story develops throughout the day.
• July 2007: Launch Science, Technology and Environment sections. Included a new feature: series. This allows special navigation back and forth through items in a series such as Bad Science or Nature Notes.
• August 2007: Launch integrated video. Includes reskinned Brightcove player with dynamically-inserted pre-roll advertising.
• October 2007: Launch sections for Business, Society, Media, Money and Guardian America.
• February 2008: Launch Observer, News, and Politics sections, plus integrated audio.
• April 2008: Launch Sport and Football sections. Includes live scores and fixtures, and match facts among other features.
• June 2008: Launch Comment is Free. Includes community features from Pluck.
• August 2008: Launch of Culture, Education and Life & Style sections, plus 14 blogs moving over from the old Movable Type system.
• September 2008. Launch the remaining 21 blogs onto the new platform. Some of these blogs didn’t go in August due to the key part they played in August news events, and some because they were awaiting additional features such as remote working tools.

…which was the penultimate step before a launch, after the software had been built and released, and before the technical work to finally lift the curtain.

One of the big changes that was part of R2 was how we structured our content — our information architecture. Previously each piece of content lived in a section, up to two levels deep, and a lot of content was duplicated so that it could appear in more than one section at a time. An extreme example we often used was the affair around David Kelly and the consequential Hutton inquiry. Almost every story there crossed the boundaries of politics, media and daily news.

With R2 we were introducing much more nuanced keywording and more options around navigation. So the content in the old system didn’t map directly into the new system: it all had to be examined and reclassified by hand. Additionally, production staff needed to build subject pages in ways they couldn’t before — for example, the pages on Afghanistan, the British monarchy and the BAE corruption investigations. All this was called sitebuilding.

Of course, the tech team built tools and wrote scripts to make the production staff’s job easier, but some things just need human expertise and take a very long time. Typically we allowed six weeks between the time the software was released and the relevant site was launched and that was the period in which sitebuilding took place.

…which people often think stood for the fact that we were building “revision 2″ or “release 2″ of guardian.co.uk. It didn’t stand for that, not least because this is actually the third or fourth such revision since we launched in 1999. In fact, it stood for “rebuild and redesign”.

However, while plans for the project were still being hatched, and for just a very short time, it had another name. We were just finishing a day planning the project’s priorities and were aware that when The Guardian newspaper changed to its Berliner format the transformation was called internally Project Kennedy. With slightly too much levity at the end of a long day in single room we chose another 60s icon to provide the name for this project. At the time it seemed like a jolly good idea.

Next morning the cold, fluorescent office light of reality hit: no-one wanted to go in front of the board and ask for a large amount of money for something called that. After a flurry of e-mail Mina came up with R2, and everyone liked that — it was neutral and serious.

So R2 it was, and remained.