It sounded like a great idea, but would it work in practice? Here’s my journal from my very first Website in a Day.

For those just joining us, Website In A Day is a new concept from Innoveghtive, that aims to put professional Website-building into the reach of even the smallest businesses. The concept is simple: I come to your business for one day, and build your site from the ground up. The result is a professional-looking site that puts your best foot forward online.

But until last week, it was just a novel concept; it has never, to my knowledge, been put into practice. I know my skill set, but there are so many variables in Website creation that I must admit to being a little nervous. So when I successfully sold the service to my first client, it was not without trepidation that I drove into Toronto last week. Here’s how it went down.

9:30 am: I arrive at the client’s home after battling some serious traffic. I take out my laptop and wireless modem, and set up on the desk provided for me.

9:45 am: Liz, the client, and I sit down to talk about the site. She’s already emailed me an overview of the site’s structure: what main navigation buttons there will be. She’s also got images of some of her main graphical elements: her logo, a “border image” of fruit and vegetables, and a signature image (what I dubbed “fitness woman”). I sketched out for her an idea of what the site would look like: logo on top, navigation buttons across the top below it, and perhaps the border image running down the right side. She approved the concept, and I set to work creating a prototype in Photoshop.

11:30 am: My first prototype is finished. This is a purely image-only representation of what the site’s template will look like: It has the logo (which I had to recreate from the low-resolution image provided), navigation and borders that will appear in the final site. No content (the actual text that you would read on the site) appears yet, although a place has been set aside for it. Liz immediately liked the design overall, but wanted to play with the colours a bit. We made some alterations right there, and ultimately agreed on a final look.

1:00 pm: By now I’ve converted that approved image template into an actual Web page. This page is the rendered result of cutting up the image into little chunks that users can interact with in their Web browser. The navigation is complete, and there are empty pages for each section of the site: “About”, “Nutrition”, “Fitness”, “Presentations”, and “Bulletins”. Every page is empty, though. Fortunately, Liz has prepared content already for most of these pages.

2:00 pm: By now I realize we’re going to have a complete site done by the end of the day. Getting content into the site means I’m doing a lot of typing (note to self: have client assemble all pre-written content electronically), and using my USB thumb drive to move documents and images from Liz’s home computer to mine. The “About” section is done, and Liz is writing on some later pieces as I go.

3:30 pm: I’ve added all the content I have been given thus far, so I take some time to write some scripting code to the “Bulletins” section, so Liz can add content there herself down the road. It’s a pretty simple system, but that’s perfectly suitable: I provide an easy-to-use interface that allows Liz to modify a text file with the latest tips. It resembles a traditional word processor; whatever she does in here is echoed out to the Bulletins page.

4:30 pm: Liz and I are going through the site on my computer, and she’s making change requests for images and text. We work through these, but as time is running out, we’re starting to slow down. The site is pretty much feature-complete: the only task left undone is a paper-based profile form which I’d offered to scan and post later on (my scanner’s at home).

5:10 pm: The site is done! Her hosting arrangements weren’t quite set yet (it would be a couple days before that happened), but I had the site posted to my own development server on innoveghtive.com; Liz was able to continue reviewing for any errors or other changes. Immediately we found some compatibility issues with Microsoft Internet Explorer (as usual!); I would fix those later on that evening.

Over the next couple days, Liz continued to view the site and make some small change requests here and there. I think that’s to be expected, and I allowed for that. Of course, after a few days you have to close the door! Liz cheerfully agreed to that policy and rounded up a final set of change requests. Luckily, her permanent host became active on the same day as her final changes were completed: the site that went live was everything she’d hoped for.

You can see the site for yourself: Fit Into Health.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:13 pm and is filed under E-Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.