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…which was not part of the project scope when we started R2. It’s fair to say that when we began implementing in February 2006, the idea of a Guardian America launch was not on the radar. Yet by the middle of 2007 it was being talked about very seriously, and increasingly so. How did we fit in an additional sub-project?

As much as technologists might sometimes think they hold the key to success, when it comes to media it’s still true that content is king. Guardian America’s success is driven from its editor, Michael Tomasky, and his team. But technology did provide the vehicle for that.

The most valuable thing we technologists did for Guardian America was to not reinvent the wheel. We recognised that the core elements had already been built — most notably a front page designed to showcase a variety of content was already in use as the guardian.co.uk front. Making use of that also ensured design consistency. But that’s not to say there was no work to do. The content management system was not originally designed to support two major fronts, particularly with a variation in branding. The core work, then, was to extend something we had already delivered and make it more useful.

Using this approach everyone won. The Guardian America team got all the functionality and flexibility that we had delivered for the team running the original site front, and they got it relatively quickly. From an operational point of view, by managing Guardian America in the same way the guardian.co.uk front was managed, the GA team was able to share skills, people, advice and creative ideas. The tech team got to show they could deliver technology for a high-profile project on very short timescales. The business as a whole won because the overall R2 budget remained constant. We managed that by deprioritising a small amount of less important work in the usual Agile manner. I don’t think there were any arguments about what, exactly, was deprioritised, since Guardian America was so clearly more significant than many other features on our list.

…which was one of the key goals of the project. This exposes one of the significant aspects of R2: it was neither editorially driven, nor technically driven, nor commercially driven. It was driven by a unity of needs right across the company, and it needed to be successful in all these areas.

There are a few ways in which we’ve added flexibility to our advertising system, but I’ll mention just a couple here.

One form of flexibility is in the use of our ad slots. Our pages have been designed to display ads of various sizes, and reshape themselves accordingly. This is most obvious on some of the right hand ad slots — sometimes you’ll find them displaying an ad that’s a squareish rectangle, sometimes you’ll return to the same page and find another that’s markedly taller. In theory that’s a trivial piece of work, and HTML and CSS can handle that with ease. But in practice, of course, it’s more challenging. One of those challenges is trying avoid using an iframe container which ensures ads don’t unduly interfere with the rest of the page, but which force you define their size before the ad server has had a chance to tell what size the ad needs to be.

Another, related, form of flexibility is in our non-use of ad slots. You’ll be able to see this on the guardian.co.uk home page which sometimes has ads on it, and sometimes doesn’t. In the early stages of R2 the ad sales team made a decision I’ve always admired: not to fill certain ad slots just because they could, and ensure there were periods when the guardian.co.uk home page was ad-free. Apart from any other advantages this means that when ads do appear they have more impact, and of course it increases the value of advertising on the home page.

I like the work we’ve done on advertising less because of the technical achievements, but much more because it shows we’ve used R2 as a chance to rethink how we approach our business and break away from some conventional thinking.

…which is one of the features central to the Eduction section. An example is this page of GCSE results.

Education tables are a great example of how one specialist requirement can reap rewards for so many others. We decided the Education section couldn’t be launched until we had created the ability to display and manage tables, and that’s one reason why we waited until August 2008 to launch it — there were a lot of other features to build before we got to tables.

Since launching tables for the Education section we’ve extended them for wider use. For example, they now feature more flexible formatting and the ability to click on a column for sorting. They’re also being used in other sections, such as in the Media section to display newspaper circulation, and the Football section to compare recent Spurs managers.

Journalism used to be about writing articles; these days it includes not just text, nor just audio and video, but also — as people like Adrian Holovaty and Jeff Jarvis have long said — managing and exposing data. This is one example of how that can happen.