What is the quickest way from a concept to a site?

I've got a bunch of website ideas and I was wondering what is the quickest way to get from a pretty thorough concept definition (idea mind-maps, use-cases, architecture diagrams ) to a working website. The only point is to get to something that's functional, not worrying about performance. The idea is to get something out to showcase a functional site, and after worry about fine-tuning or re-writing parts if necessary.

I am familiar with quite a few web frameworks from open-source and proprietary world, but I could not find so far a swiss-army-knife of web development environments that can get you fast from a concept to a working site. I was kinda wondering if there is such a thing, free or non-free

Looking forward to your suggestions...

UPDATE: The question might get a bit too metaphoric for the kind readers of this site, but I'm at a moment where I feel that implementation details are killing my creativity ... maybe you'll laugh or you'll feel offended, I'm just wondering if anyone can give me a useful hint..

There really is no quick way of doing this. If you are looking for investors or people to work on the site with then a detailed spec will have to do. If you need more then you are just going to have to start writing the real site. In this case you need to use whatever you know you can use to produce a site quickly. The framework itself is far less important than your experience with it.

No matter what, if your site is functional rather than just showy (like a profile or movie site), you are going to have to program the code yourself to get it working. However, for quickly developing the visual parts of a site I would recommend software like:
* [NVU][1]
* [Dreamweaver][2]
* [ImageMagick][3]
* [GIMP][4]
* [Photoshop][5]
* etc.

For the rest of it, you are going to need something that can help you program in whatever language you choose. Personally, I prefer the apache/PHP/MySQL server setup as it is quick and easy to do, also you can use almost anything to create PHP files (vim/nano). For windows, I would recommend [Notepad++][6] or [Programmers Notepad][7].

Please note, however, that even if you use these tools, it in no way guarantees that you will be able to crank out sites quickly.

Hope this helps.


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IMO, the quickest way from concept to a site is to actually build it (please read on). Choose an idea and build a simple site around it. While building it, keep other sites in mind, which will hopefully help you write highly reusable code. In reality, there is a lot of stuff you can re-use: user login systems, data access layers (to a certain extent, of course) and other "common" parts. Once you write or buy some of these things, next sites will come much easier.

Assuming your site is sufficiently unique enough that it cannot be done with something off the shelf (CMS, blog, open source, etc) then your next best bet to get the site done quickly is to use a programming framework such as asp.net, RoR, Django, Wicket. You mentioned Coldfusion and that's a possibility too.

Which framework you use depends on you. In many cases the framework will have ways to cut down development time by giving you functionality in controls/functions or generating code for you. asp.net has a dynamic data scaffolding-like feature that will build a generic "admin" interface for your database.

Another way to speed up development time is to use an IDE that uses a GUI to build your site. Some IDEs like this include Dreamweaver and Visual Studio.net (or Visual Web Developer). Using these IDEs you can build your site almost without touching any code.

From the perspective of an asp.net developer, and not wanting to incite a holy war, web forms designer in visual studio, not really free.

Use an ORM like SubSonic (or similar) to generate a DAL, you can then use the forms designer to drag and drop your way to a functioning proof of concept pretty quickly, utilising a toolkit which will cover 80% of the tasks that you are likely to encounter.

The resultant markup will probably be very ugly and the site may be a little less performant that what you would want for production, but pplz will be able to click stuff and watch dem blinkenlights.

If the idea floats, you can then tweak and maybe reuse your DAL, and maybe port the site to MVC or something else that makes leaner markup.

Over time, you end up collecting a fair amount of commonly used things, and your prototypes aren't quite so ugly under the hood, so they take less time to turn in to production pieces.

So, that's one perspective, but if you have never used .net, the initial learning curve might make this not so quick.

First, select a dynamic scripting language. Static types and compilation will slow development. PHP is a good choice since you can download a LAMP package like xampp and start immediately.

Next, use a CMS if at all possible. If you require a flexible front end design, then choose a template focused CMS like Expression Engine. If your site can be relatively generic looking, then use something like Drupal.

If you require the flexibility of a framework, how much time can you spend learning it? You'll get up to speed with CodeIgniter or Kohana quickly. Other frameworks can save time with behind-the-scenes magic, but you can lose flexibility and the learning curve is <strike>steep</strike> expensive.

Outsource. Go to rentacoder.com or similar.

Something that other posters haven't mentioned so far is sketching out the interface first. Design what your main screen will look like, and where the links will take you. It's always a good idea to plan before diving into your problem.

Checkout [Google App Engine][1]. Seriously. I'm a .Net developer with no python experience although I used to write a lot of PHP back in the day. I also have difficulty with quickly prototyping web apps as they pop into my head but this morning I decided to give app engine a whirl and managed to get a working prototype for a simple mashup in a couple hours. It rocks. It's very easy to get your head round and extremely simple to create data driven apps with.

Very impressed.


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