Web Projects Blog

Every digital worker should have an indispensable collection of resources, tools, blogs and sites that they regularly use to improve their productively, skills and understand the current issues in their field.  Everything listed in this and the next few posts are mine!  Today’s post is going to cover the blogs and podcasts that I read daily.  Some don’t relate to whats covered in my job description, but I find it helps to understand the problems your co-workers relate to.

Development

• Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen
• ScottGu’s Blog
• Coding Horror
• Joel on Software
• Blog - Stack Overflow
• .NET Rocks!
• Visual Studio Hacks
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
• Rick Strahl’s Web Log
• Code Better
• Knowing .NET
• NOOP.NL
• you’ve been HAACKED
• Alt.NET Podcast
• LifeDev
• Mark Forster’s Blog
• ‘The Official Programmer’s Heaven Blog’ Blog
• The Cranking Widgets Blog
• Visual Studio Hacks
• Sara Ford’s Weblog
• The Thirsty Developer

Design

• Yanko Design
• Tutorial Blog
• Behance.net Featured Projects
• Abduzeedo
• Webdesigner Depot
• PatternTap.com

Project Management

• Managing Product Development
• Better Projects
• The Pragmatic Manager Podcast
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life
• Rands In Repose
• Semantics Incorporated: The Feed
• Martin Fowler’s Bliki
• Project Management Blog - Connecting Developers, Building Worlds

The Rest

• Life Hacker
• TEDTalks
• Brand Republic
• The Simple Dollar
• Unclutterer
• Zen Habits
• 43 Folders
• Simple Productivity Blog
• Black Belt Productivity

Friends, colleagues etc…

• The Digital Agency Blog
• The Design Hippy Feed
• James Mallorie
• Short Bored Suffer
• Social Mash-up

At work we have a wall devoted to ideas, a bit like the Google Wall idea. One question that came up was to define every consideration when building a website.  So here goes….

1. Content
2. Design
3. Security
4. Amount of innovation
5. Platform
6. Hosting
7. Interactivity/Client rIch functionality
8. Development languages
9. Development Environment
10. Usability
11. Project methodology - Agile?
12. Documentation
13. Cost: Fixed price/time and materials
14. Third party integration
15. Deployment plans
16. Level of customization required
17. Elicitation strategy (Requirements & Spec)
18. Project Resources Required
19. Additional software required
20. Design pattern
21. Email
22. Published content Vs user generated content
23. Web 2.0
24. Timescales
25. Phased Delivery’s
26. Audience
27. Accessibility
28. Disaster Recovery strategy
29. Beta Release
30. Purpose/goal
31. Asset Management
32. Taxonomy - IPSV
33. Standards - LGSL, LGNL
34. Browser compatibility
35. Analytic’s & KPI’s
36. Mobile Version
37. Advertising
38. Digital agency selection
39. Change logs & Scope creep
40. Payment Gateway/eCommerce
41. Aggregation
42. Buying Vs Developing
43. Stickability
44. Dynamic Vs Static
45. Workflows
46. Search
47. SEO strategy
48. Multi-lingual
49. Support
50. Reliability
51. Test Strategy
52. Performance & stability
53. Friendly URL’s
54. Members/member handling
55. Database requirements

I have been contemplating starting this blog for a while now and here it is!

I work in the south coast of England for a digital agency called Redweb. The agency mainly produces enterprise level web sites for public sector and commercial organizations throughout the UK.  My role within the company is to design, implement and oversee the technical aspects of these projects.

Before Redweb I worked at content management software vendor call Immediacy for several years.  During my time with immediacy I worked within the professional services department.  We mainly specialized in  consultancy, training and implementing web sites, so I get labeled as a bit of an Immediacy expert at Redweb.

The initial thought  for this blog was to be solely on Immediacy.  If anyone out there has ever implemented an Immediacy solution you’ve probably encountered the frustration of lack of documentation and not being able to find the information you want, but honestly it’s far to boring!

So the idea for the blog got gradually refined into the issues facing web developers delivering web projects.  I’m hoping to cover topics such as communication, what software and resources exist for web developers, maybe some technical issues and more than likely some other random musings.

Finding information on coding issues is easy what I struggle to find are peoples thoughts on the issue they face within in this field.

So… I hope someone will find this interesting, enjoy !