In the midst of bringing the first public revision of flyGarmin to a close at work, a friend emailed me and asked if I could whip up an “instant web site” as his new startup company was about to get national attention. I had a week.
So I worked a normal busy day every day that week, and every night I came home and worked on the new site, kept company by my bride and my new John Adams DVDs. It went like this:
- First weekend
- Assess and install content management system (CMS) packages (Drupal, Joomla, etc.)
- Monday
- Meet and plan; project actually starts
- Tuesday
- Planning with pencil and paper… no touching the computer until I had a perfectly clear plan
- Wednesday
- Build the XHTML and CSS framework
- Thursday
- Fill in the templates images and colors
- Friday
- Final touches to template and custom javascript enhancements
- Saturday
- Install Drupal onto live server; convert template to Drupal; learn to hate Drupal; install Joomla onto live server; convert template to Joomla; learn to use Joomla
- Sunday
- Finish polishing Joomla template; add all content, images, and video
- Live Monday AM!
It was quite a week, but we got a pretty nice site out of the deal. And the great part was that I was able to make it client-maintainable right from the beginning. Open source is the coolest. I know that folks who love Drupal really love it, and I can tell it’s really powerful, but it just wasn’t “jump-in” intuitive like Joomla.
Oh, the site… weathernation.net. :)