Revisiting the 30-Day, $1K Web Site Challenge – Mission Accomplished!
A while back I wrote a post claiming I could launch a full-blown publishing web site in 30 days and for under $1K of hard cost to me. I got too busy with my consulting business and never got around to actually doing it. I’m not complaining as I was doing really well as a consultant, but it still gets under my skin that I never did it.
Until now…
I can’t get into too many details because of confidentiality, but I just helped launch a full-blown publication web site in right around 30 days and $1K of hard cost. I can, however, share some of the keys that made such a launch possible:
- Use an out-of-the-box CMS. A good publication web site that supports continual updating, news, new products, magazine archives, video, blogs, community, social networking, informational pages (media kit, contact, etc.) and more can all be put together using basic CMS systems like vBulletin, Drupal, or Community Server … heck, even WordPress can be implemented as a base CMS or a host of any other CMS systems.
- You must know your CMS intimately. Don’t get weird on me now, I’m only saying that you really need to have a thorough understand of what your CMS is capable of, how it works, and how to configure it to get the most out of it and best meet your business needs. And you’ll need to have someone on your staff who is your CMS expert, can configure the CMS for your site, and help match your business needs to the capabilities of the CMS. They do NOT need to be a programmer, but they do need to know the ins and outs of your CMS intimately. This is an internal cost, to be sure, but I’m not counting that because usually this person is already on staff.
- Stay within the out-of-the-box capabilities of the CMS. You must adjust your business requirements to fit what the CMS can do. Period. Usually, you can very creatively find a way to accomplish what you want, but if for some reason you have a business need that doesn’t fit the CMS, you must scrap that need and find another way to approach it. This the the most critical point. If you insist on customizing the hell out of your CMS, your costs and time to delivery will skyrocket. And forget about ever having an easy upgrade down the road when your CMS rolls out new features.
There’s a reason that I used the Iraq war “Mission Accomplished” graphic for this post … we may have won the war and launched the site, but now troops are on the ground and we’re in it for the long haul. We now have to put all the content into the site, manage the community, sell stuff, and grow the site out. You can indeed launch a site in 30 days and for $1K, but don’t forget about the cost of migrating your content and running it afterward. That’s where the real cost comes in.
2 Responses to “ “Revisiting the 30-Day, $1K Web Site Challenge – Mission Accomplished!”
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Eric,
What were the soft costs involved in terms of internal time and planning?
For example, who did the graphical design, alpha testing, beta testing, Q/A, etc. and what were their roles within the business?
I’ve found that the time delay is usually internally caused in a project like this — because there are other priorities (creating content for existing products, making sales for existing products, corporate budgets and other items) that also have to be accomplished by the staff that actually know the business that the Web site is being designed for.
Note that I’m not challenging that what you did can be accomplished. Heck I can put up a forum in a few days using vBulletin with only minimal outside help (one day if I can use standard themes and graphics and already have the folder structure and some other background ahead of time) and have put up pretty decent event sites in a similar day or two frame, but instead am saying that the internal prioritization of the project *among the content and business experts* is the hard thing to get across and that it isn’t a “throw this to the Web guy/gal/team and we’ll get a site.”
Soft costs were a day of planning with the publication team, plus about 20 hours of an internal developer’s time. For graphical design, we stayed within one of the default skins of the CMS with just minimal adjustments to graphics and colors … kept fonts as they were in the skin.
You are right about the complicating factors, but in this instance, the pub team was willing to really work within the capabilities and limitation of the CMS which made the dev team’s job so much more straightforward. Because of that, they were able to get a very nice site to market quickly. Again, this does not include the costs of converting over content.