If you need to build a website and you’re in a hurry, there are lots of tools that can help you get going quickly. Let’s go through the 5 D development process and I’ll point out tools to help at each stage.

1. Discovery
2. Design
3. Develop
4. Deploy
5. Deliver

1. Discovery
The discovery stage is where you are looking to learn about the target audience and how they’ll be using the site. You need to learn about your audience quickly and efficiently. You need an online survey tool. I’d recommend SurveyMonkey. It’s quick, easy to setup, and cheap. The basic account is FREE. If you need to do surveys over a longer period (a month) or need to survey lots of people, you can upgrade for $20/month. Really nice! If you want to get down to just the facts, try 4Q (4 Questions) by Avinash Kaushik. It only allows you to ask and have answered, 4 questions. That’s it. So you get to the heart of the matter quickly and completly for free.

2. Design
Need a sweet design, but don’t have a huge budget or the time to go look for a bunch of designers? Try crowdsourcing. Specifically a site called CrowdSpring can give you a hand with this. You submit a project with a creative brief, designers submit their ideas, and everyone gets to vote on what they like, both you and the creative community of CrowdSpring. If you don’t get 25 artist submissions, you don’t pay. So the risk is fairly low. Plus the creative designs coming out of CrowdSpring are very hip and vibrant, so don’t worry about something you can’t use. Once you have a design, run it past your users before you start developing. You can use Five Second Test for this. Five Second Test allows for you to show an image to a user for five seconds. The user then submits the five items they recall along with their name. It’s a great way to see if your website objectives are coming across in the first five seconds of a user visit.

3. Develop
Don’t have a lot of time to build your website? Use a content management system. I’ve written on this before here and here. It provides for an out of the box framework that allows you to get a site up and running with little knowledge of HTML. If you have an extensive knowledge of HTML, there are numerous options that you can use such as CushyCMS, Wordpress, DotNetNuke, all the way up to enterprise solutions such as Sharepoint and Microsoft Content Management Server.  However, unless you have these enterprise infrastructures in place, this is neither quick nor cheap. Here’s a list of 50 other content management systems to get your website off the ground quickly.

4. Deploy
The best way to get your site off the ground quickly is via social media and search engines. Depending on the market segment and audiences you are targeting, social media may be a perfect way to reach them. To check, you should hop on Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Facebook, etc. etc. etc. and see if your audiences are there already. Quickly doing a search on Twitter, you’ll be able to find:

• Blogging Moms
• Industrial Suppliers
• HR Consultants
• CEO’s

And obviously, the 16 year old high school girls often associated with many social media outlets.

In terms of search engines, using tools such as Google’s webmaster tools and Google Analytics give Google a better idea of what content you want indexed and how. Granted, you are not going to be #1 in Google overnight, but this will get you on your way and provide you with insights into what users are doing on your site and what Google does or does not understand about your site. With that information, you can optimize accordingly over time.

5. Deliver
Delivery of files can sometimes be a hassle, and who needs a hassle when you’re in a hurry? Once you’ve got your final site developed and need to send it to the client, a friend, etc. you can use various websites to deliver any file format you want. For general file delivery there’s:

• Drop.io
• YouSendIt
• TransferBigFiles
• A whole host of other options

For specific file types, why not try Flickr or Vimeo. With Flickr you can upload your photos and short videos and send them along. Your recipient can then view the photos online and download them if they want. Best of all, Flickr is free for basic accounts (I think it’s up to 100 Megs a month in uploads). Vimeo is entirely free and allows you to upload extremely high quality videos, which you can then send along. Again, the recipient can view the entire video online and download the source files, if you so choose.

Many of these tools can be used across stages, so please don’t think that because you are in design you can only use Five Second Test. By all means, feel free to use any of these tools at any point along the development cycle. I just pointed out their most typical uses.

Hope that helps. Did I forget anything along the way? Know of other tools that would be beneficial to any of these steps? Post them in the comments.

image courtesy of Chrys Omori.

So as I promised, over the weekend I installed CushyCMS on one of my clients websites. The process couldn’t have been easier. Here are the steps to install CushyCMS on an existing site:

1. Sign up with CushyCMS.
2. Setup the website in question by providing FTP login information. I had this on hand, so it was very easy, but you may have to track down an email or something to get it implemented.
3. Download the website source files to make the appropriate CSS changes or use a local copy if you have the latest version of the site.
4. Open one of the files in question and update the content areas where appropriate. I had to change some items like:

   <div class="content">Content Content Content</div>
   to
   <div id="content" class="cushycms">Content Content Content</div>

5. Obviously, you have to change the CSS to reflect these changes as well, but a few “Find and Replace”s later, every page in the site is updated with the appropriate CSS and HTML changes.
6. Login to CushyCMS and add each file you want to be able to edit via the CushyCMS interface. This was actually the longest part of the process. This website had about 30-40 pages and it took me about 10-15 minutes to add all the pages. No big deal, but I’d suggest that CushyCMS perhaps add a “bulk assign” function so that I can assign several files in a directory to a website and it will take the name of the file as the “Page Name”. Like I said, not a big deal for a small site.
7. Verify everything is working properly when editing.
8. Add a few editor roles (i.e. my clients) to be able to edit pages as necessary.
9. And Viola! You’re done.

I’m currently waiting feedback from the client to see if they like the new editing interface or not. They are not HTML savvy and the interface removes the need for that and all that is necessary is a knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite of products, which most people are familiar with.

All in all, I’d recommend this to anyone creating a small website who has to support a client with either limited maintenance budget or little in terms of technical expertise, or both. It’s super easy, and with a Pro account, you can even brand the editor as your own interface.

CushyCMS
I heard about CushyCMS a long time ago via TechCrunch. This is a really easy to implement CMS in that you just have to provide FTP access and add some CSS information into your website and CushyCMS provides a front end for you to manage your website. It also allows for the creation of roles so that you can give a login to your client and they can only change the appropriate areas of the website - not the backend code. Like I said, I’m going to try this out pretty soon and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Sitemasher
Sitemasher is way more robust than CushyCMS in that it provides a more in terms of user interface, version control, database integration, and search analytics. It’s not as free as Cushy either. It’s $99/month on the cheap end, but if you are in the market for a piece of software that provides some online functionality where you can manage your content from anywhere, as well as all the functionality I listed above, check this one out.

Wordpress.com
A lot of people know they can use Wordpress as a blogging platform, but really it’s just as easily transformed into a content management system. There’s already a number of people that are doing this. If you’re not that technically savvy, I’d suggest sticking with Wordpress.com as they update the software whenever a new release occurs. if you’re a little more tech savvy or want to keep things under your own control, you can go to Wordpress.org and download the latest version. Keep in mind though that this means you have to manage the database, software installation, and future upgrades yourself, but really it’s not THAT daunting - I promise.

There’s tons of other CMS platforms out there: Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, Sava (if you’re into Coldfusion) and so many more. What I’d recommend when selecting one is decide what your technical expertise level is and how much time you have to devote to learning a new piece of software. If you need something quick and easy and don’t have a lot of technical expertise, choose one of the online versions I mentioned above. If you do have some time to learn new software and how to integrate them with database backends, choose one of the CMS’s I mentioned at the end of this article, or talk with your friends or colleagues and see what experiences they’ve had with any of these and what they like and dislike about each.

Shoot me an email if you have any other questions, or drop a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

How does yours compare? What are you doing similar or different under the title of “Digital Strategist”? Let me know in the comments and I’ll post a follow up of what the majority of our job function appears to be these days.

Well, the day has finally come. I’ve been talking about it for a while, but it’s finally happened. I no longer have a car. It’s been almost fifteen years since I got my drivers license and started driving. It was a melancholy moment indeed when my car drove away. It was the first car I had purchased, driven, maintained, paid off, and finally sold all on my own. I feel as if I’ve given up a little personal freedom by getting rid of my car, but for the little bit of personal freedom given up, here are a few of the things I gain as a result:

• Not having to be concerned with automotive gas prices any longer.
• Not having to feel as if I’m a hypocrite for voicing environmental concerns, whilst driving a car around the city.
• Not having to pay for city stickers, license plate renewal fees, parking tickets, worry about moving my car for street cleaning, or the possibility of theft or vandalism
• Not having to write a check to AAA once every three months for car insurance.

Although it’s not a novel concept for many metropolitan dwellers, I’m from Detroit and there is and, at least in my lifetime, never has been a useful method of getting around other than by car. So living in Chicago is absolutely ideal to solve this problem. I can use the CTA, Metra, bike, ZipCar, i-Go, cab, pedicab, or walk pretty much anywhere I need to go.

So stay tuned. I’ll post every so often on how it’s going. Have any interesting stories about living in a city without a car or justifications why a car is a necessary part of urban living? Let me know in the comments.

Here’s a few more resources for anyone else interested in being car free in Chicago:

• Car free Chicago
• Chicago Moms guide to being car free
• Conversation about living in Chicago without a car
• Yelp - Living in Chicago without a car

P.s. - the car above is the car I previously owned.

Here’s the original song: Technologic

Here’s the original song: Justice - Genesis (this song will melt your face)

This site is Green Certified by CO2Stats, which has measured and offset the total CO2 emissions due to the electricity consumption of clients visiting the site, servers providing the site, and the networks that connect them.

Now, because these guys are “the green search engine” does not meant that the other guys aren’t green. In fact, Google is probably one of the greenest companies in the country, let alone the search engine market. Check out their corporate green policy to find out more. And Yahoo does their part as well, with a green blog and carbon footprint calculators.

Last week, I was priveleged enough to be able to attend Google’s Reaction B2B Summit. Overall, it was an amazing experience. Google’s campus is something to behold, if you’ve never been. A full service dining hall, cafe’s in each building, outdoor work areas, lecture halls, exercise equipment, a volleyball court, bike’s you can ride wherever you’d like, haircuts on site, dry cleaning on site, wireless everywhere - pretty much everything a geek could desire and that’s only the handful of buildings I was able to see.

Unfortunately, upon arriving, we were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which is completely understandable. I’ll just say that the speakers were fantastic, I was able to meet several really smart, interesting people who I’d to meet up with again very soon if they are in Chicago (@socialjulio and @ryandeshazer, amongst others) and that I’ll definitely be going back next year, if my gracious hosts once again extend the invitation. I’m definitely disappointed that I missed day two, but I had my own fun with rescheduling flights and hanging out in airports all day.

Check out some of the pics I was able to snap during my visit below.
Did you attend? How did you think it went?

Created with flickrSLiDR.