yelvington.com

If you haven't seen the absolutely splendid redesign of the New York Observer's website, you should go there right now. It's so good that it might just lift the Observer out of its position in the marginalia of New York City media.

The site is almost completely based on Drupal, the open-source CMS platform we're using for BlufftonToday.com, SavannahNow.com and community blogging/social networking installations at all the other Morris newspapers.

Moshe Weitzman and Barry Jaspan, the Drupal code wranglers who were instrumental in the implementation, wrote a detailed explanation of how the site hangs together from a technical perspective. These guys are heavy hitters -- Weitzman is not only a core contributor, but lead author of the Organic Groups family of add-on modules.

Here's a bit of very powerful advice from Weitzman that every Web project leader, designer and developer should memorize:

Good wireframes are, IMO, the key to a smooth running, cost controlled project. They are the only way that all parties can agree upon what is to be built. Long functional requirements documents are nearly useless.