Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

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.