Have a Cup of COFFEE

Since we started the redesign of our websites, we've begun to put together a core set of web development principles to guide us. This isn't a new methodology, but a way of looking at each project and each problem. What these principles allow us to do is take a hard look at our solution and determine if it is truly the best one.

Two recent decisions can serve as good examples. During the past four months, we faced two missing pieces - an e-commerce solution and a content management solution. We experimented with a number of open source packages, we sought advice and asked questions, we researched extensively, and built basic prototypes. In the end, we decided to customize an existing e-commerce solution (Zen Cart) and build our own content management system. Each problem demands a unique solution, one that meets its specific challenges.

Introducing COFFEE

We call our set of principles COFFEE development. What does COFFEE stand for?

Cheap
Open
Fast
Friendly
Easy
Excellent

We want everything we do to reflect these principles. Of course, the first priority of our group or any web team within an organization, is to be in-line with the vision and mission of Fellowship Church. This isn't our own mission statement; COFFEE development is what we use to help us share the mission and vision of Fellowship on the web.

What do each of these mean? Every day this week I'll tackle one of these pieces and explain what it means to us and how we work to implement it. I know this will help me and my team flesh out our development approach and I hope it will benefit others as well. So, come back tomorrow with the venti of your choice and we'll see what Cheap web development looks like.

Comments

[Brad Eck]

Brian, I think your ideas are great - especially for organizations where money investment is limited. A follow-up wuestion for you, though. How do you approach maintainability? Of course you deal with it somwehat for code by using open source and readily available solutions. But how do you do it for content? A major expense (usually unaccounted for) is the cost of maintaining the content - and more importantly at minimum risk of affecting the design. We all know the pains of fixing pages broken by untrained maintenance attempts. Is there anything you are doing within or outside the limits of COFFEE to deal with teh very real expense of site content maintenance?

[Ray]

Interesting project if I may say so.

[L.L. Barkat]

If I might humbly suggest..it could be within your vision and mission to increase the type size of these posts. Just something to think about as you continue with your redesigns. (From someone who's not yet ordering Large Print editions from the library :)