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A one day guide to building a Web Application

Jul 24, 2006 by

Conor O'Neill

event

Carson Workshops “A-Z: How to build a Web App”

  ★★★★★ Last Wednesday I attended the one day [Carson Workshop](http://www.carsonworkshops.com/) on how to build a WebApp presented by Ryan Carson. The event was held in the Energy Clinic in London and had about 15 attendees. 

Ryan kicked off with a quick round-room introduction and we realised we had a very nice mix of people from funded startups, to guys looking to leave their jobs to give it a go, to companies looking to move into this area. We also had very interesting people like Imran from Orange who wanted to see what people were aiming to build.

The first session was concerned with the most important part of running any business - basic finance. His opening point was that your idea needs to pass the “credit card test” i.e. why would anyone take their credit card out of their wallet to pay for your service? The time he spent on the cash flow spreadsheet was critical for anyone who has not run their own business before. Other topics on the finance side included pricing, budgeting for the overall development, bartering for work, having a tiered service, free+paid etc.

For me, the topic which made the whole trip worthwhile was his advice on hosting. He recommended the outsourcing of the server management to an organisation based near a high-end co-lo facility. They don’t just source, install and take care of the hardware, they also manage the OS config, backups, redundancy, reliability etc etc. Not only does this cost far less than we expected but more importantly, it is one less job to worry about.

Ryan totally believes in the outsource model and this came up many time throughout the day. All of DropSend was nearsourced in the UK and some of Amigo is being done in the US. I got some great information on other countries from people like Sanjay during the coffee break. In fact, both Ryan and Sanjay believe in an almost 100% outsource model where the core company develops the ideas and runs the business but hands off everything else. This is even more extreme than the model we were planning but it gave me much food for thought. There were some excellent points made on what you need to outsource in terms of functional areas.

Of course, getting top class developers (either as hires or as an outsource) is the difference between success and failure and this is why personal recommendations are so important. There were some good discussions about contracts, payment schedules, offering equity, responsibilities, maintenance, bug-fixing, emergencies etc which are critical for the smooth running of a project.

I am quite familiar with Ryan’s preferred supporting tools like Trac, Subversion, Basecamp etc but it was good to know that most other people in the room were taking a similar approach. Obviously if you are outsourcing then some if not all of those systems need to be available externally in a secure way. I think this is one reason for the success of Basecamp.

The area I was most vague on was the graphic design workflow from our concept through to final look n feel in XHTML+CSS. The session on this was again worth the full price of the day. I came away knowing exactly the steps I needed to follow and the questions I needed to ask of a designer. Ryan’s thoughts on overall web-site design and the necessary features all rang very true with me.

Having been through the start-up process before, I have a good understanding of most of the legals but I learned about three important things which were new to me - Trademarks, Web T’s & C’s and Privacy statements. The first one in particular is now quite high on my priority list once the branding is complete.

There was a great section on e-commerce and the difficulties in getting set up for this in the UK when you are doing a fully integrated solution (as opposed to Worldpay or Paypal).

The timescales and dealines section was a nice rapid-fire run through all of the high-level tasks and the order in which you need to attack them. All of the tips on marketing were spot-on and I loved the idea of having a publicity stunt to gain attention. If your marketing is wildly successful then scaling and tech support suddenly becomes big issues and I asked quite a few questions on those areas.

And the best word of the day (also mentioned by Phil Wilkinson from Crowdstorm) belongs to Gill Carson who came up with the idea of “Teaspoons”. Just when you think you have finished the washing-up, you find all the teaspoons down the bottom of the sink. Remember your WebApp teaspoons, you are not finished until they are.

This was a fantastic workshop, a great day and excellent value for money. In addition to the Workshop itself, they provide a CD with lots of extra resources on it. Ryan has a ton of knowledge but is happy to admit when he doesn’t know the answer to a question and he got lots of tips from attendees too. If you get a chance to attend any of their upcoming Workshops, I highly recommend you do.

[tags]Carson Workshops, Ryan Carson, Gillian Carson, How to build a WebApp[/tags]

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*[★★★★★]: 5 *[Jul 24, 2006]: 20060724T1039++0100