AEM FAQ: While doing a redesign, when can development begin?

AEM FAQ: While doing a redesign, when can development begin?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive content management solution for building websites and all of their complementary applications, including mobile apps, paperless forms, and online communities.
We have created an educational series to answer your most asked questions about AEM. This one gives you insight into a redesign project timeline to better understand at what point development can begin.
Stay tuned for more articles in our Frequently Asked Questions About AEM series!

Blue Acorn iCi is an AEM implementation partner. What I wanted to do today is address one of the common questions that we get when it comes to AEM implementations, and oftentimes both the technical side and the marketing side want to know, within a complete site redesign and moving to a new content management system, when can development begin?

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It’s a really common question. On the whiteboard, I have a [drawing of a] high-level AEM implementation approach. Your implementation may vary slightly, but this is what you might expect when you’re implementing a new content management system like Adobe Experience Manager, and you’re also redesigning the site.
The big buckets here are project kick-off and discovery activities, we’ve got your creative activities around UX wires and UI design. Those could include a whole host of different activities, usability testing, etc.

Then, we have technical design and development, moving into content migration, UAT launch, etc. When you think about when development can start in the context of the design process with Adobe Experience Manager, usually the technical work can really begin about the time that you’re wrapping up UX wireframes.

Once wireframes are complete, you have a sense of the overall site navigation architecture. And a sense of the templates and the AEM components that will need to be developed. At that point, you’ll be able to start to create a technical design solution for implementing Adobe Experience Manager.

Even while your UI design for your new website is in flight, development can begin because some of the back-end work can go around setting up Adobe Experience Manager, starting to build some of those base templates of components, and then as the UI design completes, your front-end development can start, and then the back-end developers can also graft that front-end code onto the back-end code.

Typically, technical design and development can start about the time you’ve made final decisions on UX wires because at that point a lot of the structural decisions have been made on the website. I hope this gives you some insight into where technical development can start on an Adobe Experience Manager implementation. Your situation may vary slightly. If you have any follow-up questions, reach out to our team.