I hear there are no stupid questions but when you're expected to know this, it's really scary to ask. What may seem like duh is usually something everyone is waiting for. How the heck do you make facebook Graph API calls anyway?
So here's where I am. Social networking and mobile apps is where it's at. It's all a bit overwhelming when you're going about it alone and at the same time somewhat reassuring to hear facebook was built by a bunch of hacks (ha!).
Paper prototyping is the way to go. There are many wireframing software but drawing it up on a piece of paper is the fastest. Think fail quickly and get it to it. To hire or do it yourself? Buying time may be worthwhile. I've been fiddling with Firefox/Firebug as an HTML editor which is recommended by facebook developers. If there's anything that seems worth learning for a non-programmer in web development is HTML and CSS. Drupal is a little heavy. New modules put a strain on performance. The cleaner the HTML the better. I still can't believe Netscape is dead. I am going back and forth with Drupal, Joomla!, Firefox/Firebug and notepad. It turns out there's no one approach, it's the best tool for the job. For now, I'm playing with Drupal themes.
On my first post, I've been pushing Hostgator but Facebook partnered with Joylent and Amazon Web Services. Eventually any facebook apps should be hosted by AWS.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Getting started on building a website FAST
by Christie Ewen
Web hosts
I spent about a little over a week researching webhosts. There are lots of cheap webhosts. Basically, you get what you pay for. What you want is scalability, reliability, and support. In the end, I chose hostgator. I am very happy with this decision. They have live chat so I can ask pretty much anything with one click. For example, “What’s the difference between domain.com and www.domain.com?” They’ll answer anything.
Here is a breakdown of webhosts that were recommended I looked into:
| Web Hosts | Cost per month Starts at | PROs | CONs | Other |
| | $4.95 | Great reviews 5/5 stars review Great live support Very good uptimes | $9.94 off package price: COUPONCODE994 | |
| | $3.95 | Highly recommended by a friend web programmer | 4/5 stars review | |
| $3.67 (limited time offer) | limited features compared with other webhosts | | ||
| $0 for 6 months, then $6.99 | Recommended by users | | ||
| $2.99 | “One stop shop for domains, web host and everything in between” | | ||
| Free trial for 30 days $9.95 | Supports the Joomla! open source community Great way to start using a CMS right away | Limited live support Only supports Joomla! | | |
| $3.45 for a limited time | | Based outside US | |
For more comprehensive reviews, just google “lunarpages review” and “hostgator review” and so on …
Some of the reviews are outdated so what was true a year ago might not be true today.
Content Management Systems
CMS can help you quickly build a website.
I decided to go with Drupal because we needed technical flexibility. There is a huge community support behind Drupal so you can build almost any kind of website with Drupal. There are modules for almost everything like search, facebook, twitter integration, and so on.
I like Joomla! because I was able to get it up and running very quickly on cloudaccess.net which offers a free demo site for 30 days. Learning it didn’t take very long with the videos available on cloudaccess.net. The problem I found is that the user interface was not intuitive. I recommend trying it to get a feel for what CMS can do. Another nice thing about cloudaccess.net is their support for the open source movement without which we would be reinventing the wheel a million fold.
For some projects, Word Press might be all you need.
Outsourcing
You can save a lot of time and money by hiring programmers from India, Indonesia, etc. Just be sure when you outsource, you don’t outsource your “secret sauce”. Your “secret sauce” is what sets you apart from any other website. You can review outsourcing companies on sites like elance.com.
I’ve personally never hired anyone from www.xicom.biz but they got very good reviews on elance.com so they might be worth checking out.
Copyright. Christie Ewen. October 28, 2010 All Rights Reserved.
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