Website development tools for non-professionals

So, it was time to reinvent and my content was brewing in my head. I was ready to put pen to paper (fingers to keyboards?) and needed the best website development tool very little money could buy!  Realizing my original approach of using the free editor that came along with my hosting service would not work, I moved up the price ladder by going with Aspiresoft which is a content management system provider. The idea was I could manage and change the content whenever I needed to and won't have to rely on someone else to do the redesigning. On the plus side, the tool is online so I can get to it from anywhere. On the down side, it's not the easiest tool to learn specially if you are not a web designer (I know basic HTML but I am not a web designer!). Also their tutorials are lacking so you have to commit to learning by doing if you go this route.

As should be obvious by now, I decided to keep my blog separate mostly for SEO reasons. That was 2 months ago. Since then, I've learned more about WordPress which is also an online CMS provider and if you are willing to go with their basic templates, you can host your website there for FREE! (you still have to pay for your domain name). WP has a very powerful blog tool. As for keeping the blog separate from the website, I am starting to lean towards having both under the same domain name.

So, I got busy with my new website. A couple of weeks later, I was asked by my sister to design a website for her as she was preparing to run for office. With her site, I took a new approach. I used Godaddy as the domain name provider and host but instead of using their low cost website editor (I used such a tool for my very first website offered by Verio and quickly learned that you get what you pay for!), I chose to dust off my old 2002 version of Dreamweaver software and build the site on my local hard drive!

So now, I have experimented with 3 different ways to build simple websites by a non-professional:

1) Cheap website editor - very ineffective even for simple websites but very low cost.
2) Content Management System - powerful but probably too complicated for simple tasks and could be costly for SW licenses and monthly fees.
3) Dreamweaver editing tool - middle of the road complexity but it helps to know basic HTML. Reasonable onetime cost of purchasing SW.

Of course, I still plan to try out Wordpress. I would like to try integrating my website and blog but it needs to allow me to transfer my work so I don't have to retype anything. The goal is to keep the costs down as low as possible since I am doing all the work and they are just hosting my bits.

Evolution of a consulting business!

The last couple of months have been an Internet blur.  It started innocently enough when I decided to redesign the website for my consulting practice.  Initially, when I decided to strike out on my own, I wanted to focus on bringing an effective solution for measuring and managing multiple projects.   This practice is called 'project portfolio management' or PPM with several companies specializing in building enormously sophisticated software solutions (Clarity, Cognos, Microsoft, Planview and others).   The full-version of these solutions cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for licensing, training, integration and even more for customer customization.   It turns out I was able to build an in-house version of this capability at a fraction of the cost using Excel!  Although, doing PPM this way has a lot of limitations for larger companies, I figured it just might be what medium companies would be willing to pay for since the tool enables early visibility into problems with non-performing projects and potential to save millions.  Well, I figured wrong!

In a nutshell, it takes too much efforts to convince smaller companies the benefits of knowing the ROI of every project and if the market projections are on track because the pain is not yet great enough.  In a tough economy, these companies are too worried about shorter term survival than longer term capital planning and cost savings.

After blitzing through years of research, adding new arrows to my quiver, validating that they add value to my clients' operaions and discovering that the fire is still burning inside, I am re-launching the new website.  But before we get into the advance topics related to the business of high-tech product planning and marketing, it would be interesting to talk tactics of the website development next.