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Was thinking yesterday that I wanted to create a platform where I could post my photos without Instagram and everything that is connected to the Facebook universe. Then I remembered this. It clearly didn’t last long. Though it’s not dead, and maybe I just tried to take it too seriously. Stop caring so much and just put your thoughts down on paper. Or digital bits which are worse because they may become indefinitely archived.

In web design as with many things, process is critically important. You need to understand the purpose, motivations, expectations and assumptions of the project owner and the end users. But then sometimes it’s better to throw convention out the window.

On Saturday night during GovHack, while all the teams were churning away on their projects not wanting to be distracted, one of our volunteer team mentioned that they were trying to get a new website but it was taking forever. I can sympathise with both parties in this situation. Developers are busy and want to get things right, and the football club “just wanted a website”. So I decided to see what we could come up with in the next few hours with a subdomain and WordPress. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

Bec, our football loving volunteer, started checking out other clubs sites to see what “a website” for a football club might look like, and I went on the hunt for a free theme.

SIDE NOTE: Today we are going for a free theme because the assumption is that this website will never see the light of day. There are some fantastic free and open source themes out there, but please don’t shy away from spending a little money on a quality theme that provides professional level support. To create a solid theme takes a huge amount of work, testing and refinement. For what you get out of it, the cost of a premium theme is peanuts!

It turns out that a lot of people across the world like Football, and a lot of people like WordPress. The two together mean there is a whole sub-genre of football focused themes and plugins. So bam, pick the first one that seems reasonable and load it up. Jump on the clubs Facebook page for the logo, colours, and photo’s. I won’t bore you with the details of the build, but needless to say it involved a bit of Gimp editing, finding out where the games were actually played, and half a dozen lines of css to fix some bugs and replicate ‘premium’ features of the plugin.

In the end we have a reasonable website that is sufficient for a local football club. They can now move beyond the conversation of ‘we need a website’ and shift their thinking to what they want to do with it and how much time do they want to spend on it. Do they really want to write up a match report after each game and keep detailed stats on each player? Do they just want to load up all the games in the season and only edit it if something changes? Do they want to implement a payment gateway to accept memberships?

This was three hours work and a good example of a situation that didn’t need a detailed needs assessment, kick off meeting, project plan etc. Sometimes we need to be comfortable with throwing a few hours of work in to start building and see where it leads us. Granted you’re not going to take this approach for a rebuild of SydneyFC.com but for a local football club that doesn’t have an existing website they really do just want “something” on the internets.

Have just started GovHack NT, a first for the Top End. It’s going to be a huge amount of work and despite telling myself that I need to say no more, this just had too much ‘fuck yeah’ to turn away from.

There’s nothing there yet, but follow along http://twitter.com/GovHackNT

So I’ve jumped on the open source micro blog bandwagon. Wondering if I’ll be more or less interested in this than Twitter.