Project Planning 2.0: Research
A well-planned project is the essence of efficiency and cost effectiveness. I am assuming with this article that you have already done the first phase of planning a project, which is a laundry list of things that you want your project to contain. I will be using the example of setting up a personal website. In phase one, I determined that I wanted a blog, a photo gallery, and a contact form. Phase two is about researching all available solutions to fulfill your needs and deciding on a solution to use. This is the step that many people get stuck on and is often overlooked.
Let’s research the blog first. Let’s go to Google and do a simple search for “blog software.” Good, we only have 289 million search results to look through! Fortunately, because of Google’s awesomeness, we don’t really have to look past the first two pages of results to find what we’re looking for. Just from the first page it looks like there are several resources that provide the software, and several resources that compare the different software packages. We’ll start with the comparison resources, but make note of the software resources we see in the results: WordPress, MovableType, b2evolution, TypePad, and Blogger.
Comparison resources are good, but they must be taken with a grain of salt. It can often be an overwhelming amount of data, but if you can pick out some key features to compare, then it will make it more manageable. Let’s look at TwitPwr.com/compare/. Immediately I see that this article was last updated in 2006 and I have to assume that most of the features have changed since then. About the only thing I can get from this article is an idea that some of the blog software that I have already seen has been around for at least 3 years. That’s a good indication that they are solid pieces of software that are kept up to date.
If the comparison resources are a dead-end, then you can move on to researching each individual piece of software. I am going to construct a matrix with some of the key features that I’m interested in for the solution that I choose. Most sites will have a demo that you can look at or a trial to test out or screenshots of the software. It might take some time nailing down all the features, but if you take a little time and patience, you can really learn a lot. There will also typically be a gallery of live blogs that you can visit to check out if it looks like something you’re interested in.
Now we can evaluate our matrix. One thing I saw is that with Blogger, your blog is hosted on their server. I want it to be hosted on my own server and use my own database, so I remove Blogger from my available options. I don’t want to have to pay for my blog, so I move TypePad off my list. That leaves me with three options. Now it’s really time to start getting picky and this is probably where personal preference comes in. I didn’t really like the user interface for b2evolution, so I’ll take that off the list. At this point, it’s time to follow your gut feeling and pick a solution. I’m going to choose WordPress.
I will use the same technique to research photo galleries and a way to do a contact form. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t pick the right solution the first time. You can always use that as a learning experience and then move forward.
I have shown you some basic techniques to research solutions for your project. You should be able to use this same procedure no matter what kind of solutions you’re looking for.
Action Steps
• Research one of the components that you want to include in your project.
• Use existing comparison resources to help you do your research.
• Make a final list of solutions and analyze their differences.
• Decide on what you think is the right solution for you.
