How to manage technology decisions in 5 easy steps, by ReportingOn creator Ryan Sholin

Submitted by Matt Thompson on Thu, 09/10/2009 - 11:48
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Ryan Sholin is a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner.

How to hire developers and make technology decisions without even trying in five easy steps:

1. Learn a little bit about any one Web framework, standard, or programming language. If you blog, open up the guts of the tools you use and start with something you'd like to change, learn how to do it, and do it. With any luck, you'll pick up enough about the topic (my early favorites were WordPress and CSS-based design) to improve your ability to tell developers and designers what you want.

2. Choose the people you want to work with and spend an ample amount of time telling them what you want. In the end, you're going to come up with a clear description of what you'd like to build, and then you're going to entrust those specifications to your team. Think of this like a blueprint. You might decide to move that wall a few feet over, or to use a different material for the siding, but the house should turn out -- mostly -- the way you drew it up in the plans.

3. Hire human beings, not a programming language or Web framework. Unless you're doing the programming yourself, stay focused on your end goal and steer clear of mandating how the humans you hire do the job. Don't look over the designer's shoulder and worry about which shade of eggshell white to paint the walls until you have something really great to hang on them. Like content, for instance.

4. Speaking of content, have a good idea of what it's going to be before you start working on a design for your project. If your designer doesn't know what to put in the boxes, it's extremely difficult to wrap them up nicely. "Make it clean, with a lot of whitespace" doesn't get the job done. Supplying your designer with examples for all the content types you might use (text, images, video, audio, etc.) will save you both trouble later on.

5. Be ambitious. Don't be afraid to try building something that's never been done before, or that some people tell you is impossible. That's the idea: Come up with an innovative solution to a communication problem. Work with a team -- and technology -- that helps you solve that problem while inspiring you along the way.