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Ask YC: How to provide an overview of web development to a non-techie?
I volunteered to provide an overview of web development to a friend of mine who is a project manager (not in technology). He wants to start managing web development projects but he does not have a technical background. I put together the following list of things to cover. I would appreciate your advice on this - should I add more? How much detail should I provide and is there any order I should follow? How do I keep my cool when he does not get things, even after explaining a 5th time! TIA
1. Web Servers and Browsers - How websites are served and viewed.
2. HTML and CSS - Show him the basic ingredients to build a HTML page. Tell him what CSS is. And then teach him to build a simple site in Dreamweaver (the guy is not a coder!)
3. Site Layouts and Structure - Explain common layouts used in most websites eg - brochure site, blogs, newspaper sites, ecommerce sites, social news sites, video sites, etc.
4. Design - Not sure what to tell him cos my own design skills suck. I just know its really important.
5. Open Source vs. dot net (maybe I should not even include this)
6. CMS, - Talk about Joomla, Wordpress.
7. Common components used in websites - video, forums, FAQs, user registration
8. Domain names, whois, etc.
9. Different phases of web dev
- A. Requirements, B. Design, C. Build Out, D. Content, E. Testing,
- noodle 18y agoif you're going to talk specifically about HTML/CSS to cover markup/styling, you should also maybe mention programming languages to make them understand how things like CMS and such are built. edit: i'd include this instead of the OS vs .net debate, with possibly the OS vs .net debate as a sub-topic. i'd also expand the CMS topic to include all software packages, but focus on CMS and similar things.
- rcoder 18y agoNot to be too negative, but I think it might be a bit ambitious to get someone with no technical background up to speed on the entire web development lifecycle quickly. Being an effective web project manager is software project management; it just happens to be client/server software with a very, very large installed base of clients. I would focus less on specifics of servers and implementation languages, and more on numbers 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9. If he can focus on the information architecture, usability, and overall project workflow, a decent design and engineering team can support him in the rest.
- keefe 18y agoI think having somebody build a site in HTML and CSS is a waste of time. There has to be some knowledge of the space and I think almost everyone has the basic knowledge of what is a website now. You've mentioned one development process, but a lot of good shops are doing iterative development, extreme programming and - in particular - test driven development. The big hole I see here is scalability and distributed systems. This is a very technical topic, but the fact of the matter is if you are building a large scale web application it has to, well, scale. That means clusters of servers, managing memory across these servers (memcached perhaps), transactions, consistency all this stuff.