Building a Website

Building a website, or any piece of software from the ground up is hard! There are numerous facets of the software engineering process which are unknown to most stakeholders. In fact, people who work closely with programmers still consider some things we do to be some kind of black magic.

The properties that make up a good website include a good idea, and a solid appreciation for the software process. The second part is where most would-be Internet entrepreneurs fall apart. Many prospective webmasters simply have no clue just what it takes to go from nothing to a working and successful web platform.

One easy way to avoid disappointment is to use a ready-made solution like WordPress. With some custom styling, many website ideas could be quite successful using nothing more than Joomla.

However, there comes a point in a website’s lifetime when it gets too big for the generic solution. While it’s important to avoid the Not Invented Here syndrome, there are a some advantages to maintaining your own solution.

Techniques

Over the coming months, I will be taking a simple idea for a website, and I will build it into a full working product. Everything from defining the problem space, to entity-relationship diagrams, database programming, business logic, user interface and everything in between. Throughout, I will be demonstrating some software development practices that are commonly used, as well as some that should be used more often.

In the end, I will be registering a domain and maintaining the website for real; this will add some real value to the whole project, and hopefully keep people interested. I will make the documentation for the project available as it is produced for readers to review and comment on.

Ultimately, this exercise should clear up a few things about software development, and provide a useful reference for those who are considering embarking on their own web project.

Onward!