8 Steps To Building A Successful Project

are you in the process of building out a project or planning to build out a project soon if so you need to watch this video I'm going to share with you all of the steps you need to take in order to give your project the highest chance of success if you're working on a project you most likely are going to need some form of web hosting which is perfect because today's video sponsor is atlanticnet and they're giving you an entire year of free hosting on their servers and these are actually fairly powerful servers they're even more powerful than the servers my own website run on so you get an entire year completely for free on their servers and if you use the code Kyle you get an additional $50 of credit that you can use towards additional things such as additional storage cPanel or whatever you want on top of that these servers have incredible redundancy and backup procedures so you know that your data is always going to be there and always going to be safe you don't have to worry about it going down or disappearing or being deleted it's always going to be there so I highly recommend you check out atlanticnet and use the code kyle for an additional $50 welcome back to web dev simplified my name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner so if that sounds interesting make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos just like this one now the very first thing that you need to consider when building out a project is what is the exact purpose or function of your project what is your project solving is it going to solve some problem for a user is it going to be solving a problem for you what exactly is the core essence of your project and this may sound like an easy question but most people think of an idea where they think of a problem they think of a solution and then they just go and try to start build it but you really need to distill exactly what the purpose of your project is and exactly why people would use it or why you would use it that way you know the exact most important parts of your application let's take for example let's say I want to build a course platform for all of my courses and all of my videos in that I know that the most important thing that people are using this platform for is that they can learn web technologies through mind and my courses so I know that the most important part of my project is not that it's a course video platform is that it teaches people how to learn web development on that platform so now I know the purpose of my project is to teach people and it's not to build some project that hosts courses so usually that purpose is going to be something that's not concrete it's usually what your users are getting out of your project and not so much what your project is now already if you've thought this through you're miles ahead of most people when it comes to building a project and the second thing that you can do is to think about your target audience this is something that most people completely ignore when they're building a project most of the time the project audience may just be yourself you may be building a project purely for you to use and that's perfectly OK you know the target audience is you and you can kind of skip this step but a lot of people want to build projects for other people commercial projects or just fun projects that other people can use so you need to really sit down and think what is the exact persona of the person using my project let's take for example that course platform I talked about for me the persona of the people on my platform are going to be people that are looking to learn web development and most likely they're going to be beginner to intermediate level web developers looking to learn web development so I know that my target audience is going to be that group of people you can even break it down further such as where these people live for me it would be global people all across the world are watching my videos so I don't really have a specific region but if you're making something local you may know it's only going to be people that live in your city or your country that are going to use your project also depending on the project that you build you may have different genders or age groups that are more likely to use your project so knowing that is really important overall by understanding the exact audience that you're going to be serving as well as the exact purpose of your application you're able to very easily narrow down the most important and core concepts of your application which leads us perfectly into our third point which is that you want to figure out what are the core components of your application what is the most important thing that your project is going to do for me with my course platform the most important and core feature is people watching videos I need to have some way for people to watch videos on my platform that is the only thing that matters user authentication is not that important payment processing not that important just having a way for people to watch video is by far the most important and core feature of what my application will do and you need to plan out what that core feature is for your project and you may think this core feature is really big you say the entire project is important but I promise you you can cut a lot of things out of your project like for example my course platform you can cut out the payment processing you can cut out the user authentication and just do the simplest thing of making video that people can watch and you may think that's crazy because how can I sell courses without payment processing and user authentication but I can handle payments outside of my course platform through PayPal for example and just manually do payments that way and instead of having user authentication I can just email people a generic password which will unlock the page for them so I can just have a single password protected page which uses the same password for everyone and then send that out obviously this is not ideal for a real world large-scale application but when you're getting started just knowing that single most important component and doing everything else later as late as possible is a great way to get started because you only have to build a small component of your project instead of something very large so now that we understand exactly what the core component of our application is we can jump into step number four which is to figure out exactly what technologies and languages you're going to use to build out that feature so for me that course platform that I talked about the main thing that I need is an easy way for people to watch your videos so I'm probably going to want to have some kind of video player so I'm gonna look for video player libraries because I don't want to use the built-in HTML one I also would want to look into video streaming so I would need to look at something like CloudFlare which you can host and stream my videos for me or maybe something like Vimeo that can handle video streaming as well that's going to be really important for my project but when it comes to other things such as a database I don't initially need a database so I don't need to really think about that too much and then when it comes to architecture or if I want to do maybe JWT for authentication or if I want to do it front end app that has an API this is something that you want to consider based around what your core component is for my example here I could go with either a normal server rendered app or I could do a front-end app with an API in the backend it really doesn't matter honestly I could even do a static rendered application that just uses that single password to authenticate users onto the page you really just need to figure out what technologies are going to play into your core component and then build out those core components if you have for example a really simple block there's really no point in building that out using all these really fancy cool technologies when you could simply just use gatsby as a static site generator and make a simple blog that way incredibly easily so make sure that when you're planning out your technologies you don't do anything to overkill you just figure out what your application does to figure out what technologies best match also I highly recommend that you go with technologies and languages that you're already familiar with because trying to build a project and learn a new language and learn a new framework and learn a new architecture all at the same time is a recipe for disaster you want to know as much upfront as you can so going with technologies and languages you already know will give you a much higher chance of success and that now leads us into our fifth point which is going to be develop a design for this portion of your application so go into your favorite design tool or even just get a pen and paper out and sketch up just a rough UI of what your application is going to look like not every project is going to have a user interface so you can skip this if you don't but I can assume that most projects being built has some form of user interface or user interaction so you want to sketch up what that's going to look like so that you can really easily iterate on that inside of your design tools which are much quicker to build than actually writing out this with HTML and CSS for example so go through and iterate through your designs and as you're building out your designs make sure you're constantly thinking about the first two points which is going to be the actual reason people use your application and the target audience you have you want your user experience and your UI to Matt perfectly with why people are coming to your app so that way when they get to your app the thing they want to do the most is the easiest thing to do on that application so make sure you really think about that when you build out this UI then once you have the UI figured out in your design tools you can move on to step number six which is going to be actually developing and building out that application for real and this is going to be using the technologies we talked about in the previous example we're going to put that together and make a quick and dirty version of our simple version of our application so we don't want to build the entire full-blown application we just want to build that one single small component of our application and we want to build it as quickly as possible so don't worry about making the best architectural decisions don't worry about making perfectly clean written code just make it good enough as long as it works and functions that's all that matters you want to get people using your project as soon as possible so it's really important that this MVP Minimum Viable Product is as quick and dirty as possible to build that way you can immediately get people using it and talking about people using your project that leads us to step number seven which is get this in front of people you want to get your project in front of other people as quickly as possible because you have bias you're obviously biased toward your own project you know how it works you know how to use things but as soon as you get other people using it they're immediately gonna know all the things that are wrong with it they're gonna see things that they don't like and they will let you know so figuring out what these problems are as soon as possible means you can easily quickly change them iterate on them and make improvements so that is why you want to get people using your project as soon as possible this is why in the previous steps we only built the smallest component of our project and then we got people using it because maybe you had a huge grand idea for all these additional features but your users never actually wanted any of those features and they all wanted something else instead now you didn't waste weeks months even years building out all these extra features only to find out nobody actually wanted them so now you're actually building the core features your user wants and also building the additional features that they want on top of that and once you get that feedback from your users essentially you're just gonna loop back through all of these steps you're going to make sure that you reanalyze your project make sure it still aligns with what your users want you also want to reanalyze what your target audience is you want to go through reconfigure all of your steps to make sure you're using the right technologies and then instead of building out that core component you're gonna build either improvements upon it or you're going to build new features on top of it and if you need to do design work make sure you include that before you actually start building the feature throw it back out to the people using it and just constantly iterate and iterate and iterate you want to iterate as quickly as possible so the shortest amount of time you can go from the first step all the way to the last step and get in it in front of people and then reiterate and again is crucial to building a really really successful project I've built multiple large projects in the past and every single time that I take too long to iterate or I try to build too much at once my project almost always fails and that's because I don't get feedback from the user and that is the most important thing you can get when building a project so I really hope this was able to motivate you to start building and planning your own project and I also want to hear what is the project you want to build let me know down in the comments below and if you enjoyed this video check out my other videos linked over here and subscribe to the channel for more videos just like this one thank you very much for watching and have a good day

Channel: Web Dev Simplified

Views: 51,267

Rating: 4.9432726 out of 5

Keywords: webdevsimplified, how to plan a project, how to plan a project from start to finish, how to plan a web dev project, how to plan a web app, how to plan a programming project, web dev planning, web dev project planning, web dev project ideas, programming project planning, how to plan efficiently, how to test a web app, web app planning, web app ideas, web app project planning, web development, web development planning, web development project planning, javascript, js, html, css, plan

Id: wTrcabKENrY

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 15 2020