Rapid Development: Swift but not Hasty

14 September looms imminent, but I feel confident that we will meet, if not exceed, our expectations. My client and I have established an extremely effective workflow with our screen sharing/conference call method.

Image via WikipediaThe first time I was involved in such a meeting, it was in a corporate conference room with a projector, a dedicated data line and a bunch of folks on each end of the line -- a one-to-one connection, even for the corner-office honchos, was just too expensive to consider.

Now, the screen sharing is free, and cell phones make better speaker phones than the dedicated desktop models we used back then. That's real progress, I suppose...

Speaking of progress, we made great headway duting yesterday's conference call. The look and feel, based on modifications to the selected template chosen in the previous meeting, was approved. We spent most of this session getting into high-level "function and flow" stuff, such as:

• Site participant roles - visitor (anonymous user, not logged in), member (non-paying, logged in user) and subscriber (paying member)
• Site staff roles - contributor (columnists & bloggers), editor (1st level content approval, layout & design) and publisher (final approval for posting content, full control over all layout & design elements
• Logical functions - such as "subscribers view posted video blogs immediately; members view with one-week delay; visitors view teasers only"

 The rest of the call focused on the first real consideration of the front page, more in terms of what will be there, than what it will look like. A rotating graphical element for latest news, blog post, etc - but done via JavaScript instead of the usual Flash animation.

This both minimizes page loading time (important to avoid losing impatient visitors) and enables the content to be scanned by search engines (important if you want any visitors in the first place).

Our brainstorming session gave birth to one fantastic idea which, again, is a challenge to deliver by launch date, but it's doable. We decided to have polls (as many sites do), but use the results of the poll to deliver focused content, links and associations to the viewer based on their responses, rather than just posting the results (as if anyone is really that interested).

Basically disguising surveys as polls. Genius. Drupal, powered by the modular capabilities we've installed beneath-the-hood, can do all that. The question, of course, is can we, by September 14th?

Stay tuned...

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For Rapid Development, Slow Down

Another conference call in our quest to a 14 Sep website launch. We've really established a successful workflow, which will server me well as a model for future client relations. One of the first things we established was the need for more meetings before actual launch day:

•  Look & feel, navigation, initial site layout - 22 Aug 
•  Roles & workflow; preparation for transfer to live site - 26 Aug

We quickly decided on the overall color scheme & font selection. The font, not a standard web font, will have to be imported - which means I will have to learn how to do that. More homework, but then that's why we're applying the Pareto principle with our conference calls.

The generous nature of the Open Source community provided us with a template acceptable to our end goals and compatible with our color scheme, boosting our progress and reducing the design effort by... well, about 80%.

Image via Wikipedia
Having done her homework, she provided two reference sites that gave me a good idea of her internal picture of the finished product we're aiming for.

The key thing I'm learning is that it's possible to not be in the same room, but to really be on the same page. In fact, the screen sharing sessions coupled with the telephone calls, with her on speaker phone and me wearing an earbud, actually helps us focus by removing visual distractions and eliminating the need to "shoulder surf" while attempting to share the same computer screen.

We're each in our own work environment, on our own computers. And we're both focused on the task at hand. With each "meeting", we get a clearer picture of how much work we've done (the demo site looks more like the finished product), of how much work we have left to do (the demo site doesn't work like the finished product) and how best to close the distance (we have a finite number of days until actual launch day).

Spending hours on the phone, taking the time to talk things through, being able to review the same computer screen together, is what enables us to get so much done so quickly. In many ways, the cell phone and screen sharing will end up being the real technological heroes.

That is, assuming we have cause to celebrate.

Back to work. More to come...

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Site Unseen

Many businesses pay a lot of money for someone to make a website for them. Yet from the huge number of poorly designed websites out there, it doesn't look like a good return on investment for the most part.

Not counting incompetence and outright fraud, there are still too many bad websites out there which were supposedly designed by professionals. In this age of free technology and even freer information, how can this be? As I venture into offering website design as a Small Business server, I've thought about this and came to the following conclusion:

Many businesses, especially Small Businesses, spend lots of money on two things which, while both useful, are not website design.

The first and more common is web hosting. These business owners or representatives will meet with someone who ideally should report to sales, who claims to assist in "site design". What they actually end up focusing on, however, are low-level technical concerns, like bandwidth, storage, and the programs available for the client building their own site.

Image by Getty Images via @These are all useful things, but they don't make a website. They are the components of a website -- good enough, if you can build your own website, which most Small Business owners and operators cannot.

The next common mistake is hiring a graphic designer as web builder. These guys are usually very helpful at creating logos, banners and a website's overall visual design. They may even create basic functions, like login, with a database back-end if you're really lucky.

But, again, this is not a website -- this is a collection of nicely designed web pages. Today's "standard" website should be more than pretty pages, sitting there. Successful websites must have function, and be as advanced as the space shuttle is from the original Wright Brothers' motor-powered glider. Pretty pages and a clever Flash menu simply won't cut it.

An effective modern website, without being fancy or complex, should

• Have fresh content, lots of it, and be easy to update
• Include all media -- sound, images and videos -- with no expert assistance needed
• Include the ability to create user profiles, login, post comments, upload media and create relevant content
• Allow website users to interact without outside intervention to "discuss among themselves", and create the premium content that will add real value
• Enable users and content to be categorized so that the right people get the right information

Neither web hosting services nor graphic designers masquerading as website designers can provide this level of basic functionality without the old-fashioned, 20th Century attempt to lock you down with customized code which is difficult to update and keeps you held hostage by the original programmers.

This is where Open Source stops being a geek buzzword and becomes relevant to Small Business owners and operators. Content Management Systems -- tech-jargon for "website building applications" -- like Drupal, Joomla! and Wordpress are free to download and are provided by most major web hosting services. Their value to the Small Business owner is not simply because they're free.

Because they are Open Source, it means the knowledge of configuring them, and building working websites is widespread, and standardized. Built on a modular model, functions are easily added not by hiring another programming specialist, but simply by plugging in and configuring the appropriate module for the required feature.

Features once the work of high-priced consultants are now easiliy and affordably provided. Provided, of course, that you hire the services of an actual website designer -- someone who will consult with you, get to understand your business, your workflow and your needs, and create a website that doesn't just display pages and pictures, but one that is the ideal online resource to serve you customers, and represent the best efforts of Your Small Business.

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Rapid Development

14 September.

It helps to have a deadline. An internal sense arises that helps steer me away from false starts and time-wasting fascination with useless details.

As a techie, it's easy to waste hours with the "gee whiz" aspect of things that won't actually be used in this phase of the project. A deadline helps set a time limit on mental wandering.

I just recently completed the second conference call with the online magazine publisher who is my website client. Our first conference call, last Tuesday (10 Aug), I used the free "DimDim" screen-sharing service (I do not name these things) to show her the prototype Drupal website, and a variety of themes so we could get a baseline of the "look and feel" she desires.

This week, she e-mailed me PDF samples of her magazine for an idea of the fonts and color scheme, and we discussed various aspects of the behind-the-scenes pre-construction concerns such as:

• What information would we collect from people who visit the site?
• What content will be visible to everyone?
• What "premium" content will only be visible to those who sign up and log onto the website?
• How will the site integrate with social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter?
• How will we catalog and categorize user information and site content so that we can cross-reference information, and present customized views to each user?
• How will the website communicate with off-line site members (email/SMS/twitter/et al)?
• Can/will there be Google Apps integration?

and so forth. A dozen plus years of corporate IT support taught me that to successfully complete complicated projects quickly, the 80/20 rule means

80 percent of the effort is the work done in the first 20 percent of the project

It's all in the advanced planning. Drupal, like Joomla! and Wordpress, give Small Businesses the ability to do nearly anything that can be done with a website, cheaply and easily. Cheaply and easily, that is, if you plan what you want the site to do first, then determine what information and configuration you'll require to accomplish that.

This means you do the heavy lifting -- database mapping, form building -- before you worry about things like appearance and layout. Once you make sure everything works properly, you not only can take your time arranging it, but you'll find it's easy to arrange things when you're not inventing them at the same time.

By taking this top-down approach, we ended our call with a series of milestones mapped to the calendar:

• Look and feel final conference - 18 Aug
• Soft launch (moving site to production server) - 28 Aug
• Meet with site editor & content contributors - 1 Sep
• Content freeze and performance shakedown - 6 Sep

A pretty aggressive schedule, but the only way we can actually launch a site that doesn't exist yet is to determine precisely the tasks and sequence of actions required, and strictly adhere to a no-nonsense schedule. Which you don't tend to do when the due-date is months away, or more.

It helps to have a deadline... or so goes the theory...

More to come

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FREE is the new GTD

Image by philcampbell via Flickr

Image by Régis Gaidot via Flickr

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I have always attended business networking events as an essential part of my Small Business growth strategy. They are a marvelous source of innovation, inspiration and comraderie.

There are also, of course, the occasional cash-paying business prospect. But much of the value is, well... free, but it's also priceless. Recently, I've learned from these meetings that barter is an effective method of exchange, given the right partner in the trade.

One of the members of a Small Business networking group I attend monthly has an online magazine that's going from quarterly to monthly. She wants a new website built, using the Open Source web building app "Drupal". I've worked with Drupal, and certainly appreciate the challenges and benefits of working with this platform.

So she will get a cutting-edge website, and I will get the experience of building one, and a reference site for future paying clients. Of course, while she is leveraging my expertise, I am basically providing professional services for FREE. Even if we accept that the skills developed in real-world conditions will eventually have commercial value, how can I afford to do the actual work, while also having to service my paying clients?

That's where the value of Open Source technology proves itself. From the start, I have saved literally hundreds of hours by downloading a pre-built Linux server running a Drupal website from Bitnami, and run it in my free virtual computer environment provided by VMware.

No additional hardware cost. In addition, I've leveraged the efforts of installation and configuration experts, for FREE! And all this is just the start of how free technology makes this barter more than a fair trade for me.

In upcoming posts, I will journal my efforts from prototype to live website. I will explore the actual software and technology used in my Open-Windows blog.

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