The concept of Agile Web Development and project management are important to a complex web development project. It helps reduce the amount of miscommunication between all involved parties in the project and it allows for a change of direction. Agile development should also reduce errors, bugs, and mistakes in the code or project. When I watched the video it almost felt as if the screencast host was reading through my old company’s emails.

About two years ago my old employer was losing the battle for total domination of the first search engine results page. The first page was being dominated by customer review sites like Reseller Ratings and Trust Pilot with less than exceptional reviews from former customers. As a new social media analyst with the company, I was placed on a team with the SEO guy and the Marketing Technology team, which included a few developers. The goal was to build a website that showed off the customer service interactions on social media (more specifically Twitter). The project was difficult because it wasn’t a high priority item on the marketing technology team even though it was a fairly simple project using Twitter’s API. We would meet every two weeks but people brushed off the meeting or emailed their updates. The point of contact for the project would change every other week depending on who had more time on their schedule. Instead of the project taking a month (I know now it shouldn’t take anymore than two weeks to use an API) it took well over three months. Should I have known about this agile development concept, I would have sent the manifesto to the project lead to avoid constant headaches. It would have encouraged us to meet more frequently, get information from one source, meet everyone who was on the team, and the team would have gotten a better understanding as to why the project was necessary for the company. You can take a look at that project here: www.wireflytweets.com.

I’m finally done with the www.milagrocleaning.com project from the semester. Although it will never completely be done, since I’ll be adding content consistently to drive traffic to the website, it feels good to have accomplished the functionality aspect of the site. My classmates have asked a ton of great questions that offered up ideas in their critiques and issues section of my github repository that only helped further build out my site. Looking back on these summer months and what I have been able to comprehend is unimaginable. I always understood certain pieces of html, but to the depth that I have learned a little of all these coding languages and how they play a role in a CMS platform like WordPress is unbelievable. We have all complained, gotten frustrated, and struggled, but we’ve all learned great concepts throughout the semester.

This is a quote that has defined the semester for my classmates and I:

“If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” – Fredrick Douglass

UPDATE: Amazon accepted me and the website as an Amazon Associate! Alternate income sources are awesome!