A few themes emerged which generally came down to one question:

How would you roll out a community and encourage participation to see it grow?

Here’s what I offered to the conversation.

Be clear on what the value of participation is

Why will people participate? What are the compelling reasons to join in? What are the tangible benefits? People need motivation and incentive to participate, the more clearly you can articulate what this incentive is, the more likely you’ll be able to form an internal strategy that will lead to involvement.

If you don’t know where to start, start by listening

There’s a good chance your audience is already self-organizing itself online. Seek them out and get a sense of what conversations and interactions are happening, and use this as a starting point to decide how you might (or might not) participate in those spaces.

“Seed” the site prior to launch

See if there are any active communities that have already formed (whether it’s online communities, or maybe real-life communities that are looking for or would benefit from an online space) and approach these people to see if they would be interested in being “beta” users for your site. If they decline, it would be worth figuring out why, and that might point you in a direction for re-shaping your strategy for what you are offering.

Find a community manager who is a natural “champion” for the site

There is most definitely a need for a formal role to be given to someone who can help nurture and grow a community online. The best case scenario is to find someone internally who has deep organizational/institutional knowledge, who is already active in the different social media channels that exist, and who will gladly take on a community manager role with open arms. The last thing you want to do is force it onto anyone by making it a hard line in their job description.

Be open to the possibility that whatever you build and roll-out may become obsolete by this time next year

It’s tough for large institutions or organizations to deal with on all sorts of levels (much less-so for the small and nimble web startups), but we seem to be entering a stage in the web where there are so many new tools emerging, and so many changes to the overall landscape, that investing heavily in any one platform is risky. Trends in the industry are moving so quickly that investing too much time and money into any one application opens the potential that by the time you start getting rolled out, you will have already fallen behind the pack.

Invest in people and culture

My current thinking around this is to completely avoid that investment in software and instead invest in people. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a software license or custom-development time, spend it on finding and hiring people who can participate in the spaces that are already available online. Invest in professional development, networking and learning opportunities so that eventually you have people in-house who can provide expertise that comes from first-hand experience. And then do what you can to support this culture within your organization so that you can keep up to speed with the changes as they happen.

But that’s just me, what about you?

Have you successfully launched an online community? What were the ingredients that led to success? Or even if you haven’t, what would you think are important keys to a successful online community? Experienced a failed launch? What went wrong? I’d love to hear your ideas!

If you’re interested in learning more about developing applications for the iPhone, the opportunities are out there if you’re a talented developer with an entrepreneurial bent and some tolerance for the risk that comes with selling iPhone apps in a closed market environment.

For starters, you’ll want to visit the iPhone Dev Center and sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and see if you have the chops on the programming side. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to access the online resource materials such as videos introducing you to iPhone development, as well as documentation, sample code, and a wealth of articles. As you’ll quickly find out, iPhone apps are developed in Objective-C – a superset of C that uses syntax from both C and Smalltalk. Objective-C isn’t for the faint of heart but luckily there seems to be a fair bit of documentation out there such as Apple’s own Introduction to the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language.

You’ll also want to be sure to check out the process for distributing an iPhone app and then also think of creative ways to market and promote your app – after all, you’re going to be competing with thousands of iPhone apps. In all this, you’ll also want to become very familiar with the concept of micropayments because, contrary to early predictions that micropyament would fail as a business model, micropayments have played an integral role in the revenue model of successful iPhone application businesses.

Favourite iPhone Apps?

For our part, we’re going to start reviewing some of our favourite apps right here in the Midstride blog. If you have any favourite iPhone Apps, we’d love to hear about them – drop us a comment below and let us know which you love, which you hate, which you wish you made, or better yet which iPhone app you wish someone out there would make!

Buncholinks from this Article:

Woopra is a “real-time web tracking and analysis application”. The service is free, although currently in a private invitation beta. After inserting a snippet of code into your site and then downloading a desktop client, you can monitor the traffic on your site all in real-time. Other than the cool factor, a tool like this has some very practical uses.

Real-Time Web Stats Shortens the Reporting Lifecycle

The value of Woopra comes from its real-time reporting capabilities vs. other web stats tools like Google Analytics, Webalizer, WP-Stats which deliver once-daily data. This is particularly relevant for sites when:

1. Your website has a well-defined funnels/paths and you want to improve the “conversion rate”, AND
2. You want to improve this conversion rate under a shortened design/development lifecycle

1st Key Concept: Clickthrough Paths and Conversion Rates

The first key concept here is this idea of a clickthrough path or conversion rate. At its most basic: different sites have different goals, when the visitor completes that defined goal, it counts as a “conversion” for the site. For example:

Conversion Rates for Online Communities

In an online community, conversion could be any one of:

• signing up a user account and creating a profile
• adding a post to a discussion board
• adding “friends” to your profile

Conversion Rates for Blogs or News sites

Blogs or news/magazine-oriented websites may consider conversion as being the act of:

• adding a comment to a post
• signing up to receive email updates
• subscribing to an RSS feed

Conversion Rates for e-Commerce sites

• all the above
• filling a shopping cart and “checking out” / completing a purchase

2nd Key Concept: The Iterative Lifecycle

What constitutes a conversion is ultimately based on the primary goals of the site. But no matter what the final goals are, there are different paths people can take when visiting the site to ultimately end up at that final action – the more often your visitors complete that last step, the higher your conversion rate, and the more likely you are achieving the goals you’ve set for your site. So one of the primary reasons you would monitor webstats is to make informed changes to your site that improves the conversion rate.

Th second key concept here is the idea of the iterative lifecycle of data reporting/research -> design/development or to think of it another way: measuring performance -> improving performance: once you’ve gathered data reporting back on the performance of your current website, you can then make changes to your site to improve its performance. Most web analytics tools will provide a means to monitor the funnel to conversion – and while each tool may provide different ways of visualizing it, just about all will be providing the same core data.

The largest benefit offered by Woopra is that it shortens the reporting lifecycle. Traditional stats tools update the data one a day or periodically throughout the day. So if you make a change in response to that data, you need to wait at least one more day before you can see the impact. Woopra shortens this lifecycle by letting you immediately see the impact of making the changes, along with presumably giving you more data on variability throughout the day (vs. end-of-day totals).

Other Benefits and Uses for Woopra

Real-time data provides a whole new set of possibilities to web professionals.

For example, if you work in a web team that adopts an agile methodology to your development work, Woopra could be used to run quick tests of your work in progress. Guerilla usability tests could also be facilitated through Woopra – set it up on a staging server where you load up wireframes or run an A-B test and use the real-time data to get a dashboard view of how your users are running through the tests.

There are lots of possibilities with what you could do with real-time web analytics, and the key here like with many other aspects of working in the web is to be flexible, adaptable, and creative.

At work the other day, I was forwarded an email with a co-worker asking for my thoughts to a question. The question went along the lines of: “How many emails in a defined time period should we be sending to our customers? How many emails is too many?” My answer? One!

But really, how many emails is too many?

Here were my thoughts on the matter.

When people sign up for a mail-out, it’s likely because they are:

• curious as to what they’re going to receive
• interested in something they saw from a related communication
• enticed by some sort of incentive, or
• doing a competitive analysis to see what other organizations are doing with their mailouts, or trying to get their hands on an HTML email template they can use as a basis for designing one for themselves

As long as that person gets something valuable out of the mailing, they’ll stay subscribed.

When do they unsubscribe? Anyone read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? I think people unsubscribe when a series of things happen that tips them over the edge:

1. They receive a message that doesn’t have any content that speaks directly to their interests, and
2. They receive similar messages from other sources (either from you or from completely different lists they’ve signed up for), and
3. They look in their inbox and suddenly see it’s getting full of emails that they don’t need or want or have any useful need for

Once those 3 things happen, they’ll be on the verge of unsubscribing and all it will take to push them over the edge is one more email from you on a day when their inbox is already really full. So to answer, “How many emails is too many?” in this case it really is just one!

The Key to Email is VALUE

Often a company will be sending out regularly scheduled emails – for example a monthly newsletter or a weekly update of recent discussions in their online forums. In general, these will be well-received provided the recipients signed up to receive the mailings.

In many other cases, though, people will still sign up to receive e-newsletters, not know for sure how often or when they’ll receive the email.

In general, when you send an email to someone and they aren’t expecting it (for example, they didn’t sign up to receive a regularly-scheduled mail-out or they didn’t first send you an email expecting a reply), it stands to reason that they’ll be surprised when they receive your message. People like surprises when they get something. People don’t like surprises when they are asked for something.

So following this line of thought, if you’re sending mail-outs that people aren’t expecting, you’ll want to make sure you are giving people something that is of value to them (i.e. something that’s meaningful, relevant, generally interesting to them, or has actual monetary value).

But what about the “should” from a marketer’s standpoint?

On the flip side of all this is the perspective of what you “should” do to help build your business and your brand. And on this side of the communications, you “should” be sending out as many emails as it takes to keep your existence in people’s minds.

You’re competing for their attention and need to do what you can to keep it when you get it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to send a lot of emails – it could just mean you have to send them one or two a month that will grab enough of their attention to get them to visit the website.

Provided you then have something of value on the website, that will be enough to keep them coming back or it will at least be enough to stop them from going away the next time you send them another message.

What about email marketing usability?

As far as usability goes, Jakob Nielsen is talked about a lot in circles of usability. The guy drives me nuts sometimes, but he also often has useful (or at least thought provoking) info on emails, for example check out these links:

What do you think?

There’s no place for unsolicited email, but what about semi-unsolicited email? What kind of emails do you like to receive? What do you value when it comes to email offers or promotions? What drives you up the wall and prompts you to unsubscribe?

First, It Was the iPhone

A handful of things have changed in the handheld landscape in the last few years. For one, Apple introduced the iPhone that rolled out with Safari installed on the phone. To the average consumer, having a web browser on their mobile phone gave it a nice “oooo ahhh” touch (pun intended). Suddenly you could browse around websites and it would actually look similar to what you would see on your computer. For web designers and developers, this is a much more monumental change than we, as a community, have given it credit for.

With a full-fledged web browser now installed on something like an iPhone, the barrier of entry has just been significantly lowered to offer web-based services for small-screen, portable devices. While the iPhone still has relatively small market penetration, it’s the first push towards truly leveraging the community of web developers and entrepreneurs into the handheld world.

And Then Came the GPhone (Android and Chrome)

The next big step is coming from Google – and it’s actually two or three smaller steps. The first step started with the work happening around Android – Google’s open source operating system for handheld devices. Starting with their acquisition of the Android team back in 2005, Google has clearly been planning a move into the wireless/handheld device world for at least a few years. Rumours surrounded this move, with many suggesting that Google would be unveiling a “GPhone”. It may have taken a few years, but sure enough, Google will be unveiling a phone, running off of Android, in the coming weeks.

The other big step is one that has garnered a lot of attention – the release of Chrome, Google’s web browser. While the attention around Chrome was largely surrounding the new features that would make Chrome stick out from today’s standard of web browsers like FireFox, IE, Safari, and Opera, little attention has been given to the potential impact and perhaps the real value of all this for Google.

By first rolling out an open source OS for mobile devices, and then also rolling out an open source browser, and now packaging it all into their own phones, Google will be making a strong push to establish itself in the world of mobile devices.

iPhone, Android, Chrome – What Does This Mean For Web Professionals?

Here are some thoughts and suggestions:

Learn How to Design for Small Screen Interfaces

A good place to start would be to do some Googling on “designing for handheld devices” or “designing for small screen interfaces”. There has been a lot of talk in this space for a number of years now, and even though earlier discussions would tend to revolve around the challenge of designing for 100 different versions of handheld web browsers, the underlying principles of design will hold true now as much as they did then.

For example, you might want to check out this buncholinks on designing for small screen interfaces:

Make Sure Your Current Websites Render Properly in Chrome and Safari (as well as FireFox, Opera and…well, ok…IE too)

Even though both Safari and Chrome are developed using WebKit – an open source web browser engine – sites are reportedly being rendered differently in each. As web designers, we aren’t in the clear yet – you’ll still need to do cross-browser testing. But at least now when you do it for Chrome or Safari, you’ll know what your website will look like in a handheld device as well.

Look for New Business Opportunities in Mobile Devices

Think about what opportunities are out there to merge the types of things you’re building on the web, with the types of things you already personally do on your own mobile device. Think about the things you could start doing now with near ubiquitous access to the web. For example, have you heard of Tagga?

Rethink How Your Website Is Going to be Used

As the Google phone and the iPhone gain more market share, there will inevitably be more people browsing the web through small screens. Take a look at your website right now (through an actual iPhone if you can), and do a quick assessment of how your website is going to perform for your visitors. If you’re about to embark on a new site redesign, you may even want to consider factoring in design for small screen interfaces as one of the requirements (even if it’s a secondary or “nice to have” requirement).

Keep A Close Eye on Your Web Stats

We’ve already started to see the first hints of web visitors peering at our websites through the eyes of tiny interfaces. In the stats, these show up as screen resolutions somewhere in the neighbourhood of 320×240. Keep an eye on the relative percentage of visitors you have that are checking out your site through these small eyes. Most right now are probably just curious what your website looks like on their shiny new phone, but soon enough these people will be legitimately trying to use your website through that small screen, they’ll also soon be expecting to see the same standards on that small screen as what they see on their 15.4″ monitor, and eventually the bigger players in the web will be catering to this – so you don’t want to get left behind!

The Bottom Line

The world wide web is about to get an awful lot wider – and it’ll be in large part thanks to the true arrival of the web onto smaller and smaller interfaces. With web2.0 apps that bring software-like functionality in byte-size packages, all processed through the power of cloud computing, it won’t be long before the power we now see on traditional computers gets leveraged through mobile devices. The change is coming – the question is what are you going to do about it?…And are you ready?

Reason 1 – Planning for Usability Testing Helps Keep Your Project On Track

Even if it only gets one row in the GANTT chart, having usability testing as a step in your overall project plan will give you a tangible goal to work towards that will help you move forward on your overall project.

In order to run any form of usability test, you will need to come up with mockups or prototypes of some form – be it crude Photoshop mockups or paper prototypes, or functional wireframes with a bare bones design – you need to have something to run the test on.

In this respect, having usability testing as part of your project plan helps break your big project down into smaller, more manageable chunks, which in turn helps you keep on top of your progress.

Reason 2 – Usability Testing Will Teach You Things You Didn’t Know Before

If you get a chance to do usability testing with a good variety of your targeted end-users, you may be surprised at what you find. Quite often, new insights come from watching someone use your website. What was natural and intuitive to you and your team suddenly doesn’t seem so logical when 4 out 5 of your testers can’t complete the task you originally set out for them to do.

Usability testing also gives your site a fresh set of eyes to help uncover new ideas and even possibly new features to add to your site. Sometimes it’s just a passing comment from one of your testers that might spawn the idea for a new core feature that you would never have thought of on your own.

You and your team probably also have some hunches on what will work with your target audience – maybe it’s something like a colour scheme to something more complex like the steps required to recover your username and password. Usability testing gives you that feedback to confirm your hunches.

Reason 3 – Usability Testing Gives You Data to Back Your Decisions

Unless you’re working on a personal project without any real accountability to another stakeholder or client, odds are the website or application you are working on will have to go through some levels of approval and sign off. In this process, you will be questioned about a design decision or asked to squeeze something else in. For example:

• Why is the font so small?
• Is there a reason why we can’t use the full width of the page?
• We have another 12 links that need to get into the sub navigation. Where can we put them in?
• That link down there needs to go into the top row of links on the homepage. Why isn’t it there?
• The photo on the homepage needs to be bigger. Like, way bigger. Like, ten times bigger than it is right now.

Usability testing has the potential to give you instant data to help back your design decisions. Armed with information gleaned from watching real people actually use your site (or working prototype), you will have greater credibility and more to stand on than just your opinion. Usability testing will give you real metrics you can use to support your position.

Reason 4 – Usability Testing Gives You Documentation that You Can Re-use for Future Projects

If you do a good job of documenting the findings from your usability testing, that whole process itself will serve as a valuable start the next go-around. Depending on the type of project and work being done, you may even be able to use the findings from previous tests to help get you and your team off on the right foot moving forward on your next project.

Similar to how usability testing gives you data to help defend your decisions to clients and stakeholders, that same data arms you with some information that you can use yourself. This is particularly useful when you’re confronted with making a seemingly arbitrary decision during your design phase.

Having a completely blank slate with endless possibilities and no constraints can actually be a very challenging and even frustrating space to design in – this is when arbitrary decisions are at their worst. It’s much easier to make a design decision when you have some form of constraint or guideline, really anything that can set you in one direction. And this is exactly what previous usability testing results can sometimes provide. With some baseline information on what worked and what didn’t work in the last design, you now have a starting point for this next design.

Reason 5 – Usability Testing Gives You an Opportunity to Field Test New Ideas

Usability testing doesn’t have to always be about testing something you’ve created. In fact, quite often, you could use the same exercise to test something that is, at this stage, nothing more than an idea.

In sales they would call this something like the foot in the door technique where you get someone to agree to a large request by first having them agree to a smaller one. What you’d want to do here is a little less sinister and more along the lines of trying to make the most of this valuable time you have with and end-user of your site.

Run your usability test and get your data, but then also try running some of your as-of-yet-unproven ideas and see what sort of feedback you get.

Face it, there’s definitely some administrative overhead that comes with running usability tests. If nothing else, there’s the simple task of scheduling and taking the time from people’s days to get them into the sessions. You might as well make the best use of this time and use it as a real opportunity to uncover some of the most valuable information you’ll get.

But Wait, There’s More!

This is all fine and dandy, but let’s bring this back full circle – what if you’re under a tight timeline, or don’t have the budget to get a robust usability test into your project cycle? All this is a lot of fluff if you can’t actually run the tests.

Well, usability testing doesn’t have to be that hard, and it can be done at any time in your development lifecycle – even after you’ve launched. You probably already engage in some form of usability testing yourself when you’re building your websites or applications, probably without even realizing it. We’ll go into these and other topics in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, let me know what you think! Why else would you do usability testing? Or why shouldn’t you do usability testing? If you’ve wanted to do usability testing before, why haven’t you? What’s holding you back?

Without a doubt there are at least two faces to any open source publishing platform. There is the elegance of the code, and then elegance in the visual design. Sometimes it’s this difference between the ease of working with the source code vs. the ease of designing a visual interface that will account for why one boutique shop will roll out websites with online-community-type features in, say, Joomla, while another will roll out websites that do more or less the same things, but in another tool, say, Drupal.

Coming up with a sharp new design for a website is one thing, and implementing it into a working website is another – this is particularly true when it comes to taking a Photoshop mock-up and splicing it up to fit the markup and code generated by open source software. And unfortunately, there is no good way to get a good feel for this other than getting your hands dirty yourself, or talking to someone else who has (and whose skill level you know and trust).

When it comes to the design aspect of open source software, not all products were created equal – some open source products are easier to design for than others.

Drupal, for example, is infamous for offering incredibly powerful programming possibilities, but sometimes to the point where designing beautiful interfaces becomes a real challenge for even the best designers. Now that being said, there are some amazing sites out there that are driven by Drupal.

The other alternative that will be available to you is to turn back to the “source” and make use of some community-created templates (for example: Drupal Themes, or WordPress Themes). This is an excellent alternative, especially if you’re really under the gun to churn out a hot-looking site pronto. This can also be an incredibly helpful way to learn more about what’s involved in customizing the designs for the open source tool.

Key Design Skills for Customizing Themes and Templates

There are a few key skills that you’ll absolutely need to have “in-house” if you’re going to tackle any design work that touches the source code:

1. Expert Knowledge of CSS

Any open source software you download worth its lick will have templates that rely heavily on CSS for its overall look and feel. Knowing how to edit someone else’s CSS can sometimes be trickier than starting from a blank slate and creating a completely fresh stylesheet. Either way, you’ll need to have someone on your team who knows their CSS.

2. Familiarity with Templating engines

By “templating engines” I’m referring to things like Smarty or the overall framework for how Drupal or WordPress pieces together what becomes the template of your site. While it would be ideal to have the in-house knowledge of the exact platform you’re using, the reality is that different platforms have their own methods for creating the overall look and feel of their sites, so you’ll be just as well off with a generalist who is able to figure out how a particular platform pieces together the programming logic, markup, and styles. Just because you know one, doesn’t mean you’ll automatically know them all. But if you get the gist of how a template engine/system works, you should be able to adapt to figure out the others.

3. Past Experience Customizing a Design

Ok, this one’s admittedly a vicious circle – how do you leverage past experience if you don’t have any? Well this is where it comes back to how the only way you’ll REALLY learn what’s involved in customizing the design of an open source platform is to get your hands dirty and start trying it.

The point here, though, is that if, for example, you already have one or two people with past experience modifying a WordPress template whereas no one has yet tackled a Drupal theme, this should really weigh in on your overall decision-making process of what tool to use. It’s nice if you have the time to learn the new tools, but if you’re pressed for time and need to roll out what you can by the deadline, go with what you know.

4. Past Experience Implementing & Modifying Extended Themes/Templates/Plugins

There are a lot of really good – and freely available – templates that others in the community have created and shared. And what you may quickly find out is that your time will be better spent taking one of these extensions of the core templates, and then making the customizations on these rather than the original default templates.

This, again, is an area where past experience will do you well – you really won’t know (and can’t appreciate) how hard or easy it will be to implement and then modify an extended theme or template until you’ve gone ahead and tried it.

Similar to how you should be selective of which plugins and modules to use, you can apply the same measures to help you be selective of the themes and templates you set up for your site – how active is the template designer? What sorts of questions are being asked by others who are using the template? Is the original template creator still using the template themselves?

These are just some thoughts, tips, suggestions. What do you think? What else would you be looking for in a designer? What would you want to know before diving into redesigning an open source template?

“I think the page is too narrow. I hate it when I have to scroll through pages and pages of content,” says one person.

“Hmm. Yeah, but, I don’t know…I don’t like it when the page is too wide….makes it too hard for me to scan the text,” says the other.

“Well, yeah, sure, but well. I just think it looks better when it’s a little wider.”

“Well how wide do you think it should be? It’s actually filling my whole browser window right now.”

“Oh really? I’m looking at it on my laptop and it’s not.”

“Well it’s filling it on mine.”

And on it goes…

It can catch you off guard, and it can be delicate to tip-toe around what you really want to say: “What you yourself personally think doesn’t really matter! (unless you have something more to base that opinion on).”

So what can you do to better prepare yourself for the design presentation? How can you arm yourself with the right tools to walk into a meeting confident that you can politely, and yet assertively, re-affirm the decisions you made with coming up with your design?
One of the best ways to confront – and also pro-actively deal with – the rise of personal opinions in a design discussion is to arm yourself with some good solid data, and web statistics are one of the best ways to do this.

Opinion vs. The Informed Web Design Decision

Web statistics are helpful for making informed decisions about the design, development, and on-going maintenance of your website.

Rather than relying on personal preferences or anecdotal observations, statistics provide a broader and more objective context for helping you make decisions that will best accommodate the needs of your online audience.

Web statistics can help you decide:

• how wide (or narrow) to make your web template
• when to separate content into separate pages or when to use anchor links in a single page to make sure content isn’t lost “below the fold”
• when to change your page layout or add new design elements to aid with navigation
• what tools and technologies you can reliably expect your audience to be able to use (e.g. Flash)
• what time of year/month/week/day to complete major site-wide changes

Statistics will not make decisions for you – but what they do is provide you with information that you can then make a judgment on.

For example, if you find out that only 3% of your web visitors are using browsers with a resolution of 800×600 pixels or less, you could now consider the impact of creating a fixed-width template at 1024 pixels wide (giving you a controlled and relatively large page to work with) vs. a fluid-width template (giving you a less-controlled but more flexible and adaptable page).

For any design decision, there are always pros and cons. But with web statistics, you will at least be able to make informed decisions on what the benefits and trade-offs are rather than relying one person’s opinion.

Part of the point of open source is that you don’t have to be a Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net nor a super programming ninja to get up and running with pretty powerful software. Open source increases access to the technology which in turn helps it grow. But “open source” doesn’t mean “free”. It’s free in the sense that you don’t have to pay a license fee to use the software, but there are still costs associated with running open source software. Other than basic infrastructural costs you’ll have for hosting any website, there is the added cost of the time it will take you or your developer to learn the tool.

What’s Your Time Worth?

It’s cliche because it’s true, but time really is money. The time you or your developer spends in learning the intricacies of an open source tool may pay dividends down the road – at least if you end up going with the tool that you spent all that time to learn. But the time you or your developer spends in learning the tool may also turn out to be a sunken loss if it turns out that you can’t use the software in the end. Sure, it’ll have been a good learning experience, but there’s only so much learning you can afford to do before you’ll need some bottom-line results.

Time becomes an even larger factor when it comes time to selecting and implementing plugins or modules. With each plugin or module you add, you start branching yourself off into a smaller sub-set of the larger community. If you customize the software yourself without contributing your modifications back to the community, you’ll be branching off even further. What you want to avoid is deviating so far from the core community that you end up on an open source island all to yourself.

Don’t Be Scared, Be Selective

The point here isn’t to avoid plugins, modules, or customization. In fact, it’s this extending of the core software that often delivers the kind of features that really draw in the growing masses of users. The key, though, is to be selective with what you implement.

The best time to pick-and-choose plugins and modules is early in the game when you’re taking the first steps in planning your site. And in fact, there are a few ways you can go about doing this.

Method 1: Draft up your list of all the features you’re looking for, then go hunting for a plugin/module that does it.

Method 2: Search-hunt-browse through the available plugins, modules, demo sites etc. and see what’s available. You may even get some new ideas for what you want to do with your site based on what you find.

Method 3: Do both of the above, and if you can’t find a plugin/module that does it, consider building it yourself! (Or contracting out someone to build it for you.)

You’ll likely end up doing a little of 1 and 2 (if you’re considering Method 3, you probably stopped reading this article a long time ago). No matter what, it never hurts to give a plugin or module a quick dry-run or pilot it on your development environment or sandbox – you can learn a lot very quickly just by trying to get it all set up, working (and looking) the way you want it to.

Do Your Homework, Do Your Due Diligence

When you evaluate these extensions, be sure to visit the sites from the plugin/module authors. When did they last update the plugin/module? What sorts of bugs have been reported? What kinds of comments are others submitting? Is the author actively using the plugin/module on their own website?

Depending on your technical knowledge, you may also want to take a look through the source code itself. If this plugin or module is going to become a core piece to your overall website, do you understand what’s happening well enough so that if you ever had to, you could be the one who maintains the source code as newer versions of the larger open source tool are rolled out?

Some Popular WordPress Plugins

• WordPress.com Stats – the same stats plugin running on WordPress.com
  
• cFormsII – a form-builder plugin
• podPress – to add podcasts to your blog

Ok, the Gears are Turning, but What About Making it Look Hot!?

While you assess the core functionality, the plugins or modules, along with your ability to support and customize these, you’ll also want to consider how far you can take the visual design – i.e. Step 3: Determine Your Capacity for Internal Design Work (coming up next in this series of posts).

But what works for one, won’t work for all, and quite often the sucess of your site may depend on that very first decision you make in selecting one tool over another. So how do you choose which tool(s) to use?

Here are a couple scenarios to set the stage:

Scenario 1 – You’re the local web designer/developer of your company and you’ve been tasked with selecting an open source tool to re-create your company’s corporate website. You know there needs to be some blog-like functionality, and it would be nice to add things like RSS feeds, maybe a photo gallery, and maybe some online forms for customers to contact your company reps. It needs to look sharp and have the interactivity, but most of all, you’re under a tight timeline to get something up.

Scenario 2 – You’re a small business owner wanting to redesign your online presence and maybe add something like a blog, maybe some more interactive features, and you’d really like to be able to update the content yourself without having to contract out copy-and-paste jobs to the local web boutique. You have high ambitions for the type of features you’re looking for, but are also on a tight budget.

Scenario 3 – You’re a web entrepreneur about to embark on your next project. You’ve seen some sites already that sorta do what you want to do, but not quite, but they’re pretty close, and now you’re in the process of deciding how you’re going to build this next site of yours. You need to roll something out quickly, but also need to be sure that you can maintain this initial creation and handle the future growth you’re planning for your project.

In all these scenarios, you’ll likely consider using some open source application – it will get you a head start on implementation and give you close to instant access to advanced functionality, and all for a (perceived) cost of free.

But, with the recent swell in adoption of open source platforms, the decision of which tools to use might not be as straightforward as you might think. Some common questions will arise:

• Where do you start? How do you start the selection process of an open source product?
• How do you decide which tool to go with and which to rule out?
• Once you’ve selected an open source tool, what level of customization are you going to have to do?
• What will you customize yourself, and what will you look towards community-created plugins and modules for?
• What sorts of resources are you going to need? Where will you find the talent and expertise if you don’t have it internally? And what will that cost now and in the future?

This is the first in a series of articles looking at steps you can go through to make the best choice to suit your needs (and your capabilities).

Step 1 – Do some “guerilla” market research

One way to select a platform is to do a little market research – guerilla style. Go visit some other sites that are doing what you want to do with your own web project and take a peek under the hood (Noob hint: hit Ctrl + U or Command + U for Macheads to quickly view the source code, or click through your browser’s menu looking for something like View > Page Source or Source Code).

While some developers go to great lengths to hide the fact they’re using an open source platform, many will show you in plain sight that their sites are, for example, powered by WordPress or Drupal. Some tell-tale signs of WordPress and Drupal:

WordPress’ footprints

• Do a search for “wp-content” in the source code – this is the default directory where WordPress stores things like the site’s template theme
• Look for something like <meta name=“generator” content=“WordPress 2.5″ /> – this is generated by default as well and will appear unless the developer decided to remove it from the template

Drupal’s footprints

• Look for a series of lines near the top of the source code that follow a pattern like:<…../modules/….>
  <…../modules/….>
  <…../modules/….>
  <…../modules/….>

  Modules are Drupal’s way of letting developers add pre-canned features that other developers in the open source community have created – it’s a way for you to pick and choose to add just the extra features and tools you’re looking for.

• Another sign of a Drupal-powered site is a line with:/modules/cck/CCK is an acronym for “Content Construction Kit” and is one of the most popular modules for Drupal that lets developers add greater customization to the default Drupal installation.

Ok, so why does this matter?

Based on what you’re seeing in the source code compared to what you see through the user interface, you may also start to get a sense of how much customization or extension is needed to achieve the functionality you’re looking for.

Now again, sometimes developers will take steps to re-write the original template source code to remove traces of the tools being used, but by and large most will keep some hints behind and, in the case of Drupal for example, if you see an abundant number of /modules/ added, that’s your first sign that they went through some fairly extensive work to achieve the functionality they have on their site.

After you’ve looked through a handful of sites that seem to offer the type of features and functionality you’re looking for in your own site, you’ll get a sense of what the preferred tool of choice seems to be. There’s nothing wrong with replicating what the most successful sites are doing. In fact, it’s probably in your best interest to do so.

There’s a little bit of game theory involved here. You’re not the only one taking a peek at the source code to see how the bigger players are powering their sites – a lot of other folks are doing this too. The more people who adopt a particular open source tool, the more likely there will continue to be strong adoption and further development of the technology, and the more likely you’ll have a reliable community you can turn to for help in the future.

Next step (to come in a future article): Determine your capacity to set up and maintain the open source tool

Make sense? Anything Else?

This is just one of a handful of different ways to gather your own pieces of “web intelligence”. What else would you do? What tricks do you use?