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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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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