Digital Memorial Archive

Mission & CLient Brief

Preserving ordinary lives, not just public ones

The organisation exists to collect and preserve the biographies of the deceased so they remain part of the human record. Its previous site, built by a small group of content creators, had drifted toward well-known public figures. The relaunch was the chance to return to the founding purpose: give anyone the means to submit and preserve the story of someone they lost.

The technical trigger was real too. The site ran on Elementor’s free tier, an increasingly unstable foundation as WordPress moves away from page builders. A rebuild was coming either way. The question was whether to patch the old structure or use the moment to rebuild around the organization’s actual mission.

What the client was worried about

• Standing on a technical foundation with no future (Elementor free/pro instability)
• An archive still shaped by content creators, not by the public it was meant to serve
• No moderation model for a subject this sensitive, once anyone can submit
• No path toward future funding without compromising the archive’s dignity

What we decided to build

• A full rebuild on Twenty Twenty-Five, not a patch of the old Elementor structure
• Accounts and self-service obituary submission as a core feature, not an add-on
• A moderation workflow designed in from day one, before any public submission exists
• Partnerships and monetization deliberately deferred until after launch

Stakeholder Analysis

Who the relaunch has to answer to

Small team, but not a simple stakeholder map. The people most invested in the outcome don’t all want the same thing, and the existing content creators are genuinely split on how their past work should be treated.

Risk Portfolio

Nine risks, plotted by likelihood and impact. The pattern is telling: almost everything with real consequences sits in the upper half of the chart. This is a project that can move forward as long as the current core team stays engaged, and has little buffer if it doesn’t.

Legend

1. Volunteer availability drops as day jobs take priority
2. Scope creep, e.g. paid obituary service, early ad features
3. WCAG AA requirements not fully met, rework needed
4. Moderation system fails, inappropriate content goes live
5. GDPR gaps in user accounts and sensitive personal content
6. Core technical knowledge concentrated in one person
7. Storage and hosting costs rise with uploads, no budget to cover it
8. Forum integration disrupts the existing community experience
9. Old and new sites diverge during transition, causing confusion

Open decision, not a resolved one: whether to migrate the existing celebrity-focused biographies, and who would do it, is documented as an unresolved risk rather than a decision the IT team made unilaterally. Content creators are split on keeping or retiring their past work. The plan sets a decision deadline after launch and treats it as a shared governance call between the founder and content creators.

Swot Analysis

Resilient in spirit, fragile in practice

The team’s strengths are real: a meaningful mission, an existing content base, working technical skill. But they rest on a foundation with no budget and one technical point of failure. The project can move forward while the current core team stays engaged, and has little slack if someone steps back.

work breakdown

Twelve packages, one filing system

XMind

The same milestones run through the work breakdown, the Gantt Project Structure Plan (see next section), and the project’s own file registry, so any deliverable can be traced back to where it sits in the plan.

Project Milestones

Project Structure Plan

Sixteen months, phase by phase

Built for a volunteer pace: 4 to 6 hours a week per person, with a flexible end date rather than a hard deadline the team can’t realistically hold.

Gantt Project

Budget & Finance

The zero is the point

No budget line here means no funding request went unmet. It means the team chose to scope the entire relaunch, from theme migration to accessibility compliance, around what volunteer hours could realistically deliver, and to keep hosting costs the founder’s personal contribution outside the project’s own scope.

*Illustrative only. Not paid, invoiced, or budgeted; shown to make the real scope of the project visible against a €0 cash line.

roles

Three roles, work packages built around each

Work packages are written around who does the work, not just what the task is, closer to a job description than a checklist.

Reflection

What planning this project taught me

Planning a project with no budget is not the same as planning a project without constraints. The absence of money became the constraint the whole plan had to solve for: realistic scope, honest time estimates, and a willingness to leave some decisions open rather than force resolution before the team was ready.

The content migration question stays unresolved on purpose. Treating it as an open risk, owned jointly by the founder and content creators, was more honest than the IT team deciding it alone.

The clearest lesson was about dependency. A single point of failure sitting on one person’s shoulders is easy to write down as a risk and much harder to actually reduce, and it shaped how I think about documentation, handoff, and what “done” means for a volunteer-run system that has to outlast any one contributor.