All posts by cloudsInteractive

Agile Project Management and Rally

I know this is just out of the blue. It is not a project or anything. Just today I was explaining our developer how Agile works and it has become almost the de-facto methodology replacing waterfall. He seemed to buy into what I was saying. I told him how we need to embrace change rather that fight change and how you add value to your product if you identify what works and what does not, ultimately create a product that meets what the customer may not have envisioned in the first place, but in fact exceeds that. Basically I was explaining him how you start to work on version 1.0 and at the end of it, you might actually have a version 2.0.

I saw that we don’t have any mention of Agile in our corporate website. The designer found an image that actually had a mention of it, among other things. I just liked that image so much. 🙂 Our client seemed to be interested in how we plan our products. I think Agile works for smaller projects also. Basically, if we have the mindset of change is acceptable and re-work is actually refactoring (making better) and we can make clients understand that as well (because more hours also mean better product and little more money as well) we could do Agile for small projects as well.

As far as a tool to do this, there is rally. Community version is free to use for 10 people. But we can manage only 1 project in community edition. It is hosted on rally’s on server. Another tool is JIRA with greenhopper plugin. It is one of Atlassian tools. Other good tools from Atlassian family are Cruicible for peer review and bamboo for continuous integration. These other tools make sense only for Enterprise Level application. I am sure most of us are familiar with these and other tools as well.

I am just suggesting that we can have a mention of Agile in the corporate site and our practices in creating software. While we may not do this immediately and this may seem like something to resist at first because of the load it puts on us, on a longer term, it should have a lot of benefits. I can spread the word like we do all this in our office. You can come and join us. Young people here just love to be doing something smart so that they can market themselves later. Just one example.

I will stop writing here. Gotta do some work.

Thanks.

Power of Blogging for SEO

Blogging can add a tremendous value. I have myself found solutions to numerous problems in Blogs as posts in blogs tend to be a genuine and honest problem a person is facing. Most probably he is not focused on anything else other a curiosity to find a solution desperately.

Its a way to build an online community and this is why I have added 10 users today for sharing and exchanging our problems, ideas and knowledge. Down the line as this community grows, there will be enormous amount of content regarding Web Development, Design and SEO; enough to be able to found on Google by users. There will be more keywords to be searched spread out in an ocean of contents.

No matter what best tools we use to extract keywords and how many links we submit to directories and search engines and write articles and submit those to article directories in hopes that Google will increase Page Ranks and Alexa will increase Alexa Ranks, content will always be the king.

Therefore the best way to do it is to integrate a blog into your site and start building content by not only yourself but by as many users as you want. Once the blog is linked back to the site, it will optimize the site as well as bring relevant traffic and leads.

Using Modx

Modx is a great piece of content management application with clean interface and design. The best part is it is easy to use and if you need a web design for small business you don’t need to use Joomla or WordPress or other comprehensive CMS. Modx is definitely the way to go for small business content management solution