Digital Thoughts @ Wesstyware

That’s right! Now that I have completed the project with The Designer for the Mozilla Summer Design Challenge 2009, I have the need to start up a new project. What better than one I have started countless times over the years and now have the knowledge and experience to properly implement: my very own web page. I figure I will discuss it here and maybe get some feedback on what my plans are and hopefully getting some feedback.

Project Goal

I registered Wesstyware.com with the following intent:

• To get my name in the software development world out into the open
• To give back to the development community that has aided me in my career more times than I can count
• To create a home point for all work associated with Wessty (myself) and/or Wesstyware
• To have a web-based communication tool for people to find me

Project History

Throughout my academic career, I always held an interest in web technology. I never really got to work on web specific work in school, which is where the idea for Wesstyware.com came about. Why not build myself a website while I’m learning about web development.

Since the inception of the idea, I have started the project from scratch about four times now for a number of reasons but mainly because school and “actual” work always took priority, thus I take breaks from development for months at a time. When I would finally get time to go back to the code I had worked on, I would just restart because I had new ideas for where I wanted to go with the site.

As you can guess, constantly restarting a project is never really the best way of getting something done. This time around though, I have experience under my belt, along with a new toolkit of technology and practices to make the project work.

Project Requirements

For now, I’m only going to discuss the requirements I have listed for v1.0 for the project. They are light enough that I think they are quite doable, but concrete enough to leave little to no grey area for me to start drifting the project focus elsewhere.

• Have a completely independent presentation layer architecture
  • By this, I mean I should be able to create a whole new presentation layer using any type of UI technology that I choose, and still utilize the same communication and data components that I have created.
• Have the following pages:
  • Home Page: The home page should contain news about all Wessty and Wesstyware events and projects (i.e. blog posts, twitter posts, etc…)
  • Profile Page: A page where all “official” Wessty and Wesstyware online profile can be found.

There are other features that I plan to implemented throughout while under the v1.x version number, but I’ll wait to mention those until I actually finish v1.0.

Development Phases

One of the biggest problems I had whenever I would take a stab and creating Wesstyware.com was not having clearly defined sprints or phases. This time around, I have a plan with multiple phases, and I am going to list them below. Please note that the phases listed include what has already been completed for the project and what needs to be done before I actually continue work on the website itself.

1. Start up a professional blog and post to it weekly (completed)
2. Expand access to the blog by registering with Technorati
3. Launch v1.0 of Wesstyware.com with a home page and profile page with the following features:
   • Presentation layer using ASP.NET 3.5 and jQuery
   • Communication layer using WCF
   • Data driven for all non-static data on the site
4. Add a new Silverlight 3 presentation layer using same communication and data components.

I could go further, but I think this is a big enough chunk for me to chew for the next while, considering that I do work full-time, have something of a life outside of software development to maintain. The key part of my site that I want to make sure is done properly is the architecture, which I have down. Just like with any project, you want to be able to exchange components for others, without having to disturb everything else. This is where I failed in the past, but this time it’s different…this time, it’s personal.

Okay, so it’s not really personal, I just thought that sounded kind of intense. Getting back to my point though, being a UI/UX developer, I like playing with all sorts of presentation frameworks and technologies, which is why I require proper architecture to be completed.

Feedback

My final comment will be to ask for some feedback about personal/professional websites that you browse for your own interests. Leave comments on this post about my site, or any site that you think works well or poorly. I want to get this right, and although I don’t expect v1.0 to be perfect, the more usable the better. Here are a couple of questions that could help get you started:

• What features do you like from your “regular” sites that other seem to lack?
• What makes them useful to you, outside of the content (as we can assume that the site already contains content that you find interesting)? Is it functionality, layout, social media?
• Does social media content on a site make a difference on whether or not you will revisit the site?

Any feedback or suggestions would be great. Until then world…

Catch you on the flip side.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 06:42 and is filed under WWSite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.