Are you a Geek?
No longer do you need to lock a geek in a back room with unlimited Mountain Dew, pizza and bandwidth to get a good prototype for your ideas. More and more tools are available that can be easily customized to get your point across and let people touch and feel your idea. Here are the basic steps:
- Open a hosting account with a reputable host that offers free open source application installers. Good examples are: SiteGround and GoDaddy.
- Dream up a domain name and register it with your web hosting provider
- Find their application installer and read about each application and pick the one that best suits your needs. On SiteGround, it’s called Fantastico in your cPanel. On GoDaddy, it’s called the GoDaddy Hosting Connection located in your hosting control panel found by clicking the button at the top for “Your Applications”
- Try it out. Select something like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, vBulletin, phpBB and hit install. Once setup, they will give you the link to the administration area along with your login.
- Play around and install some plugins, try some themes and see how close you can prototype your idea. If you get totally stuck, call the host for some basic support or just delete that app and start over.
- Mock up your fancy functionality for now with images or articles that explain what it will do once fully implemented.
- If you want to spend a few bucks, look for an expert who can build only the specific thing you need. Look through your LinkedIn and social networks or try out services like Elance to find the right person for the job.
Tags: application, developer, drupal, hosting, joomla, prototype, Randy Arrowood, rapid, tool, wordpress
