What is the fastest way from concept to site?

Question

I have a bunch of ideas for a website, and I was wondering what the fastest way to get from a fairly detailed definition of the concept (mental maps, use cases, architecture diagrams) on a working website. The only thing is to get to that functional without worrying about performance. The idea is to get something to demonstrate a functional site, and after worrying about fine-tuning or re-recording parts if necessary.

I am familiar with quite a few web frameworks from the open and patented world, but so far I have not been able to find a Swiss army knife for web development, which will help you quickly move from concept to a working site. I was interested to know if there is such a thing, free or not free.

Wait for your offers...

UPDATE: the question may become too metaphorical for the readers of this site, but now I feel that the implementation details are killing my work ... maybe you will laugh or you will feel offended, I'm just wondering if anyone can give me something useful hint..

Answer 1

First choose a dynamic scripting language. Static types and compilation will slow development. PHP is a good choice as you can download a LAMP package like xampp and start right away.

Next, use a CMS, if at all possible. If you want a flexible front end design, select a CMS template similar to a template, such as the Expression Engine. If your site may be relatively general, use something like Drupal.

If you need structure flexibility, how much time can you spend studying it? You will quickly get speed with CodeIgniter or Kohana. Other frameworks can save time behind the scenes, but you can lose flexibility and the learning curve is a steep road.

Answer 2

Assuming that your site is unique enough that it cannot be done with something off the shelf (CMS, blog, open source, etc.), then your next best bet to quickly make a site is to use a programming structure, such as asp.net, RoR, Django, Wicket. You mentioned Coldfusion and this feature too.

Which structure you use is up to you. In many cases, a framework will have ways to shorten development time by providing you functionality in controls / functions or by generating code for you. asp.net has a dynamic data structure similar to a structure that will create a common “admin” interface for your database.

Another way to speed up development time is to use the IDE, which uses a graphical interface to build your site. Some IDEs, for example, include Dreamweaver and Visual Studio.net (or Visual Web Developer). Using these IDEs, you can create your site with almost no code.

Answer 3

IMO, the fastest way from concept to site is to actually build it (please read). Select an idea and create a simple site around it. When building it, consider other sites that we hope will help you write reusable code. In fact, there are many things that you can reuse: user login systems, data access levels (to a certain extent, of course), and other "common" parts. When you write or buy some of these things, the following sites will become much easier.

Answer 4

From an asp.net developer’s point of view and not wanting to incite a holy war, the web form designer in visual studio is actually not free.

Use an ORM like SubSonic (or similar) to create a DAL, you can use a form builder to quickly drag your way to a functional proof of concept, using a toolbox that will cover 80% of the tasks that you are likely to encounter.

The resulting markup is likely to be very ugly, and the site may be slightly less impressive than what you want for production, but pplz will be able to click and see the blinkenlights demo.

If the idea is floating, you can then set up and possibly reuse your DAL and possibly migrate the site to MVC or something else that makes for more lean markup.

Over time, you end up collecting a lot of things that are commonly used, and your prototypes are not so ugly under the hood, so they take less time to go into production.

So, this perspective, but if you never used .net, the initial learning curve might not have done it that fast.

Answer 5

Checkout Google App Engine . Jokes aside. I am a .Net developer with no python experience, although I wrote a lot of PHP before. I also have difficulties quickly prototyping web applications when they appear in my head, but this morning I decided to give the application engine a whirlwind and was able to get a working prototype for a simple mashup in a couple of hours. That's cool. It is very easy to get a head and it is very simple to create data driven applications.

Very impressed.

Answer 6

No matter what, if your site is functioning, and not just spectacularly (for example, a profile or movie site), you will have to program the code yourself to make it work. However, for the quick development of the visual parts of the site, I would recommend software, for example: * NVU * Dreamweaver * ImageMagick * GIMP * Photoshop *, etc.

For the rest, you will need something that can help you program in any language you choose. Personally, I prefer setting up the apache / PHP / MySQL server, since it is quick and easy to do, and you can use almost anything to create PHP files (vim / nano). For windows, I would recommend Notepad ++ or Notepad programmers .

Please note that even if you use these tools, this in no way guarantees that you can quickly deploy sites.

Hope this helps.

Answer 7

There really is no quick way to do this. If you want investors or people to work on the site, then you will need to calculate the specification in detail. If you need more, you just need to start writing a real site. In this case, you need to use everything that you know to quickly create a site. The structure itself is much less important than your experience with it.

Answer 8

Outsource. Go to rentacoder.com or similar.

Answer 9

What other posters have not mentioned so far, first outlines the interface. What will your main screen look like and where will your links take you. It is always better to plan before plunging into your problem.