Management and Launch of a Web project at SAPO

I have spent the last 45 days working hard on a new Web Project here at SAPO. The decision to move forward with this project was made at the beggining of August and a middle-of-September deadline was then established (#1). A small Web Project team was assembled (#2) and the project was started.

After a lot of Web Project Management Issues, Wireframes, Webdesign iteractions and aprovals (constraint #3), Perl coding, CSS styling, user testing and bug fixing a Beta version of the project was completed and is up and running.

Fortunately, the project had some (really good) constraints and that allowed some of the problems to be more of a help and to be used to the project’s advantage.

Constraint #1 and #3 meant that we had some margin to make things happen (which might be tricky in a corporate environment). Using “timeline” as a justification for asking something is a big plus. Who wants to be the one delaying the project? Constraint #2 means that more resources equals a more complex flow of information. So working in a small (3 - 5 people) team really helped during the project time. This was even more true has we approached the deadline and moved together into the same closed room by suggestion of one of the team members. Being previously in frequent contact with 2 of the team’s members (Pedro, Morgy) also helped bypassing some potentialy slow flows of information.

An important project decision was made regarding the development: the plan was (using 37signals words) to build half a product instead of a half-ass product. By this I mean that we have set a beta version list of features and sticked to them no matter how hard it was to leave some really cool features out of the launch.

For such a big project you’d think that we wrote a functional specification document, right? No. We had a set of funcionalities we wanted to add and we built the screens based on that. From them on it’s just iteraction after iteraction until we’re happy with it.

Based on constraint #1 we had to prioritize bugs. We made sure that bugs we treated accordingly to how vital fixing them was to the overall project.

Now only time will tell how the service will evolve. Hopefully with everyone’s feedback we’ll be able to make it an even better project.

Additionaly, I’m happy to say that the project will include some Web 2.0 ideas and that all of this was achieved using open source software.

The project will be launched in the next few days and I’ll post more about it as soon as it’s available.

September 28, 2005 | Tags: tech | 1 Comment

Craigslist adapting to Hurricane Katrina

Following the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, the New Orleans Craigslist site has been providing a helpful tool (more here and here) in finding loved-ones, pets, temporary housing, relief resources, etc.

For this is has been fast adapting it’s local homepage. It’s interesting to look at the several challenges (and solutions) during this event.

In order to accomodate all the new Hurricane Katrina related listings a complete new top category called hurricane katrina was created. Category was placed on prime screen location and all the category items are red to really stand out.
In the cities list it was necessary to differentiate Hurricane afected cities from the other ones. Using the color red and a prefix and suffix for each citie, it’s much easier to scan columns and finding these cities. Nevertheless, the other ones keep the same place and size easying the regular finding process for other people.
Two adicional new links on top of the main menu. DONATE and Katrina Relief.

Only on such a simple and flexible website it’s possible to make such this kind of changes on record time. Althougth on a different kind of urgency, businesses frequently need this type of flexibility. Many realize this until the moment they need it.

I think more businesses should consider this design restriction while planning their website or service. This would surely save them precious time-to-market time on asap situations.

September 4, 2005 | Tags: tech | 3 Comments

Foxie: Firefox features on IE

Foxie is a Internet Explorer plugin that let ther user have tabbed browsing, search box on the Address Bar, AdBlock, Flashblock and Secure Update while using IE.

It brings some of the useful (and popular) Firefox features to IE. ~~This is a very interesting move from Mozilla~~ that will enable users to get used to Firefox browsing without ever using it.

This will make it easier to turn these useful features into standards. And that can only be a good thing.

Update: The guys behind Foxie have copied Firefox’s image and brand making the Foxie website look much like any other mozilla project page. Foxie is not endorsed by Mozilla in any way. Despite that, I still think this is good for Firefox in the long run (see comments). Error reported. Thanks Carlos.

September 1, 2005 | Tags: tech | 4 Comments