A Site To Behold

On Adriana Avakian's first day at United Press International (UPI) two stacks of files were deposited on her desk. A brand-new, comprehensive, multifunctional and multilingual Web site project that had been started two months before. It was a fast-track job with a huge potential for disaster. There were a hundred ways this thing could go wrong. Instead, it became

A Site to Behold.

"Our shareholders didn't want to do this job twice. They didn't want to get halfway through and have to change vendors. A lot of decisions had been made before I got there and our goals were very ambitious," says Avakian. "I looked at the stacks of files representing everything that had been done to date and just dove in."

What she found in the files surprised and concerned her. For one thing, a job of this scale and importance typically goes to a large site builder with a national reputation. UPI's site was being built by Siteworx, a small Web company in northern Virginia. What's more, they were basing the site on their own proprietary technology platform, an Enterprise Content Manager (ECM) called Axiom.

"This was not an easy job," says Avakian. "Internally, we needed to have maximum management capabilities among widely distributed users. Our content managers are spread around the world. They live in different cultures and have widely varying technical capabilities. I was very concerned about this choice."

A lot of Web site jobs come to grief and this one seemed to have all the ingredients of a train wreck. The entire site was scheduled to build and launch in a mere four months and according to a good deal of conventional wisdom that just isn't possible.