Web Site in a Week">Web Site in a Week

On Thursday, April 15, I received an e-mail from Monica about the possibility of creating a Web site for Bridger Fur Company, and that she had quoted them a special price. To build a Web site at that quoted price eliminated any traditional means for building a site. It was a job for Drupal, and open-source CMS. We met with Doug Judkins on Saturday to find out what he needed. He wanted a store front with a checkout that integrated to PayPal. He also wanted to be able to enter maintain the content himself.

What he wanted fit with my view of building Web sites for customers. I should build and maintain the structure, the customer should be able to create the content, without having to know about the structure. The person creating the content should not have to worry about accessibility, search engine optimization, the semantic web, or marketing through social networks. The content creator should focus on content, and let the software behind it do the rest. With a CMS, like Drupal, this is achievable. The challenge was the budget.

As soon as we got home, I registered the domain name and took care of the DNS and mail details. The amount of work is minimal, waiting for everything to activate takes longer. On Sunday, I installed Drupal, and started loading and configuring the modules. I always do the theme last, as it is dressing to the body of code behind it. Besides, finding a theme with the right look is like shopping. Whether it be clothes or a car, you need to try out a few to find one that fits. By Wednesday, the store was done and a theme selected. The bulk of the work was done. It was now time for testing and fine tuning.

Monica worked on the graphics for the header, and I entered the initial content of ten products. I ran tests through my PayPal sandbox account and it worked. The nice think about a sandbox account is that all transaction are fictional, and you can spend as much money as you want. In the meantime, Doug improved on my short descriptions and filled in the product details that I left out. By Thursday, he was entering new products.

On Saturday, April 14th, we met at his store in Bridger, MT for a training session and switching the store from test mode to live mode. In one week, we had a running on-line store. To be sure, we had a few issues with shipping quotes form UPS and USPS, but they were ironed out by Sunday. If you want to see how much can be done in one week, check out www.bridgerfur.com.

Now, we can expand to even more advanced marketing through social networks. Such as a fan page on Facebook, Facebook’s social-plugins, and Twitter’s @encounter. The easy way to manage all this is with HootSuite. When Doug writes a story for the front page of the Web site, a teaser will automatically appear on his Facebook fan page, and Twitter account. As soon as a module is available, there will be a like button on the Web site that lets those who click it to become automatic fans of his Facebook fan page.

As for me, I just watch Doug keep adding more products, and make sure that the site is running.