lourish.com - Building a Website on a Shoestring

Growing lourish.com
Building a website on a shoestring
Dave Bower – http://lourish.com
© Lourish 2010

Coming up...
A little background
Before you start
Building a public website
Promoting – If you build it, they're really unlikely to ever bother coming
Wrap up and Q+A

I'm great, me...
10 years software engineering
5 years leading dev teams for Internet start-ups
C#/Java/Grails development
Gardener

lourish.com

The need for Lourish
Gardening sites are all rubbish
Community gardening not involving 20-40 group
I had a LOT of cucumbers
Job driving me insane!

Before you start
Get a grown-up to help you
Bounce ideas
Keep work options open
Stop buying stuff!

Low cost start up
You don't need
a new PC/server/phone/shoes
a company (yet)
Buy domains
Free email + docs from Google
Free developer tools
SAAS may be expensive in the long run, but it has low initial cost

The tease
Internet presence, you will need...
Holding page
Blog
Vague but exciting details
Gather email addresses
Survey (WUFOO, Survey Monkey)
Email form

Designing
Fewer features
Cut out the unnecessary screens/features/details
Make common case simple
Leave the absolute bare minimum
Create real pages
Involve a designer as early as possible
Agree cost and time scale up front if you can
They know their stuff – take notice
Find someone interested in what you're doing

Implementing
If you don't code...
Kiss goodbye to building a website on a shoestring!
Find someone you really trust who doesn't just code but who also manages developers
Managing developers is really difficult
Software is hard to estimate
Financial incentives
Other incentives

Implementing
Thank God you can code...
Choose technologies with longevity
What are your strengths? Outsource everything else
Plan realistically
Missing milestones? Work out why
Don't be afraid to completely change direction
Move in to ideaSpace!

Lourish Architecture

Test It!
Really, really test it
Unit test, TDD even better
Functional test
UI Test
Load test
Staging environment
To beta or not to beta?
Users expect a working site, “beta” label or not

Launch! (And you thought you'd done the hard part...)
It's easy to build a website, it's very difficult to get one noticed
Promoting is as important as building
Good support experience can create devoted users
Use monitoring to provide feedback

Promotion
It's not rocket science
Consistent communication throughout
Use 1 key message, with maybe 1 or 2 subsidiary messages
Expect
Apathy
Insults
Mistrust
“XYZ.com does it better”
Keep promoting

Promotion - Email
Use emails gathered from teaser site
People will forget they registered...

Promotion - Email
Expect to be marked as spam if you didn't have double opt-in
Use mailing service
Mailchimp / Campaign Monitor / Constant Contact
Protection from “spammer” status
Monitoring
Expect low conversion from email to site

Promotion – Social Media
Newsgroups
No self-promotion!
Use Google alerts to find out what’s being said where
Blogs
Support the site through a blog
Promote blog through Twitter and Facebook
Get influential bloggers to write about you
Add blog stream to site for easy CMS!

Facebook
Like
Company page
Insights
Twitter
Use follows to position yourself
Use link shorteners for tracking (bit.ly, twitpic etc)
Keep posting updates or risk looking dead!

Integrate into site
APIs
Single sign on
News feeds
Give a reason for users to promote site

Promotion – Press
Press releases
Use a story
Local papers need local angle
Targeted – one key message
Get it noticed
Journalists are lazy, write their articles!

Promotion – Press
Radio and TV
Get key message into every answer!
Build “bridges”
Don't expect a deluge of new visitors!
Wrong medium for converting users
Get link on their website
Promote press appearances via social media

Promotion – Grassroots
Invites
Trusted
1 in 3 invite
1 in 10 invites converted
Local champions / Virtual champions

Promotion – SEO
Quality links to site (BBC)
Sensible page titles
Use image alt attributes
Write copy with keywords
Home page
Blog
Choosing a “meaningless” domain name helps!

Monitor
Google analytics
Goals
Traffic sources
SEO
Google alerts
See what's being said & respond
Bit.ly
Facebook insights
Wordpress

Support
Responsibility to
help users
keep site running and innovating
Respond professionally
Answer quickly
Respond only once to “chat”
Use pseudonyms
Reply during office hours

Eleven Lourish Lessons
Get help (even if it’s from a soft toy)
Early design input
Build absolute minimum
Concentrate on strengths, outsource weaknesses
Changing your mind is OK but stick to your beliefs
Release early and often
A website is a responsibility
Promotion is everything
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Network
DO IT NOW

A Website on a Shoestring
Free software and SAAS
Fewer features
Get designer in early
Promotion is free

Future Lourishment
Possible future directions
Stronger SN integration
Co-operatives
Marketplace
Fruitures

Sign up at http://lourish.com
Questions...?

lourish.com - Building a Website on a Shoestring

by dgjbower on Aug 25, 2010

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