

Ask YC: How to provide an overview of web development to a non-techie? - raheemm

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<p>1. Web Servers and Browsers - How websites are served and viewed.<p>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!)<p>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.<p>4. Design - Not sure what to tell him cos my own design skills suck. I just know its really important.<p>5. Open Source vs. dot net (maybe I should not even include this)<p>6. CMS, - Talk about Joomla, Wordpress.<p>7. Common components used in websites - video, forums, FAQs, user registration<p>8. Domain names, whois, etc.<p>9. Different phases of web dev 
    - A. Requirements, B. Design, C. Build Out, D. Content, E. Testing,
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keefe
I 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.

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rcoder
Not 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.

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noodle
if 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.

