Saving Big in Web Development
Karine Joly has a blog post this week asking for suggestions on how colleges and universities can save big in this time of slashed budgets, challenging enrollment and decreasing endowments.
My ideas about this are two-fold. One, look for open-source solutions. Second, look for web services that can fit a need. They are often very low-cost, or better yet, free.
Open Source
There are many open source products that we web developers can use to solve problems and get things done. You may already be using many of these technologies already.
Your web site is probably served by Apache. Maybe you code web apps in PHP, and use MySQL for databases. Maybe you code in Ruby on Rails. All these are open source products with great communities of developers.
Looking for a blogging platform? WordPress is a great, free platform you can build all sorts of sites on top of.
Need a CMS? Plenty of options there, including the aforementioned WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Typo and many, many more.
Can’t get budget monies for that Adobe CS4 upgrade? Check out the Gimp, an open-source image processing tool. Want to do 3-D modeling? Check out Blender.
Web Services
Don’t forget there are many great web services you can use that will help you save time and money.
Our career services team wanted a custom calendar for all their recruiting events. We didn’t have the time to build or customize a calendar application, so we looked to Google’s Calendar product. Now, career services staff and students enter events into an online calendar and we take that and embed it one of their web pages. Google Calendar also allows users to subscribe to the calendar by RSS, Google Cal or iCal. It’s a great solution that was very quick for us to set up and we don’t have to spend a lot of time maintaining it.
Want to build a quick form? Try Wufoo’s free plan.
Use Flickr’s free account to post photos. Put videos for free on YouTube. Want to get suggestions and recommendations from your visitors? Try UserVoice’s free plan. Get free stats from Google Analytics.
As you can see, there are a ton of options and hopefully the lack of budget monies won’t keep you from creating great sites and web apps.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
