Fresh

SXSW Interactive is almost here, so those months of giddy nerd anticipation are almost over! Hooray! But wait, have you studied the schedule yet? Picked your top panels? Perused the party lists? Researched the must-try restaurants and food carts? No?  Well don’t panic yet, you still have a little time. And to help sort through all the madness I’ve compiled a list of tools and sites that are helping me do some pre-planning this year. As a mere SXSW Sophomore I’m far from an expert on the conference or on Austin, but hopefully this post will help you get organized a little bit.

Finding Promising Panels

Sometimes a panel or session that looks amazing based on its short description in the official SXSW handbook turns out to be, ehhhh, not so great.  And of course the one you decided NOT to go to was the must-see panel of the day.  Although you’re not going to pick winners every time, you can help yourself by doing a little research beforehand.

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While sorting through the cupboards in my bathroom this past weekend I was puzzled to discover that I owned 23 bottles of lotion: some of these nearly empty, some barely touched, and others well past their expiration date. This got me thinking as to why I seem to forget about all the products I already have at my finger tips, and instead go out and buy the first new item I hear about promising firming, moisturizing, and/or bronzing benefits in a bottle. Like myself, I often witness clients honing in on new technology, overly excited to snatch it up and apply it to their own online marketing objectives, before first asking themselves the question “Do I really need this?”

While change is good, there is something to be said to having a purpose behind each change. We are consumers by nature and always want that new best thing, but why not first take a look at the tools you already have at your disposal and assess if you are indeed using them to their full potential.

Here are some questions to ask when considering whether or not to invest in the next latest and greatest marketing tactic. These might help you figure out if your money is best spent on what’s new or if it’d be better spent fine-tuning what you’re already utilizing.

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Growing up, my mom always stressed the importance of having great undergarments upon which to build your wardrobe. Bras and panties had to match, and it was ideal if the set matched your full outfit. She said, “If you feel good in your underwear, you’ll look great in your entire outfit.”

The same principle applies to website planning. Now, I’m not suggesting that websites wear bras and panties, but each of the websites that we design and build have certain, ahem, undergarments. These undergarments are the building blocks of a good website wardrobe.

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Rule # 8 – Define, Specify, Implement.

“You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.” W. Wonka

Always write specs! They can be long 1000 page specs or they can be 10 user flow diagrams, it doesn’t matter as long as you have all the people working on the project sign off on them as well as the stakeholders and administrators of the finished project. This will save you some of the major headaches and hurt when things start to get squirrely around launch time and you need to ask for more money or an extension on deadlines because of scope creep. If a developer has to define functionality in the middle of development, alarm bells should be ringing. By the time the developer’s fingers hit the keyboard, there should be no questions about what he or she is supposed to implement. It’s critical to have a functional specification to serve as a guide for the developer. The spec can come in many shapes and sizes ranging from nothing more than a to do list, to a full blown information architecture document complete with use cases. In either case the developer should only concern themselves with what’s the best way to implement a feature, never “what’s this for?”, or “what’s supposed to happen when a user clicks here?”

Having an agreed-upon document will ground those conversations in reality and a reasonable client will usually have no problem handing over more cash and pushing a deadline back as long as it is reasonable. Buildings are never constructed with partial or non-existent blueprints and thus neither should large websites. Imagine what buildings would look like in that scenario….. it happens more often than it should with websites. Think about that.

Welcome to the first part of an 8-part series, “8 Development Rules on how to Fail Less”.

This series is a collaboration between a project manager and a developer, who together have built some massive design and development projects landing on both ends of the spectrum of success. We’ve experienced apocalyptic fails and epic wins, and we’ve also survived assaults from scope-creep monsters controlled by unreasonable budget aliens. We have even been thrown under a couple fully-loaded Greyhound buses headed toward Albuquerque. So what’s the point? It’s that all of these tragedies and successes have been great learning experiences for us. Since we care deeply for our fellow web magic makers and dreamers of dreams, we have come up with the 8 rules to live and die by when developing huge web applications or websites in an effort to help you fail less. Please note that we are not experts, we just live this $@%! every day.

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