Just came off of a project that was very different and something that you don’t do every day. It took me and my customer a week of late nights to whip up the development, and get the product into production. In spite of the late nights, and different nature of the project, it was a refreshing and one of the most rewarding experiences of my life!

The site we came up with is www.KidsDreaminGreen.com. The customer is very special to me for three reasons: she is 10 years old, she is also my elder daughter, and she is helping a global cause. Spandana, a 4th grader from Mill Creek Elementary is very passionate about the efforts to curb the effects of Global Warming. She decided that she has to share this knowledge and awareness with all the other kids out there, and take action, do whatever the kids can do stop or minimize the effects of Global Warming.

First I thought it was easy, helping her to create a website to satisfy her cause. Once, we started the process, I realized there is no such thing is a “lesser customer”. Spandana is very clear on her vision; what she wants, how she wants, and very methodical in her approach. The refreshing part comes from the fact that she knows her target audience, and never deviated from her goals. Of course, we had our debates; and we quickly resolved issues that we didn’t agree upon. It was a pure customer-vendor relationship for most part; except for some of the ideas that I called as ‘bold’ for her age to take on, and I had to convince her we are not going to implement. She spent her entire spring break to write articles and content for the site, sacrificing all her playtime. That’s when I realized how serious she is about the project.

I couldn’t be happier for Spandana once we took the site live; for all the momentum and support she has been getting from other kids. It’s amazing to see kids rally up for the cause, and collaborate with her. Spandana and her KidsDreamingGreen.com already started showing some impact when her school principal responded, “Mill Creek will do what we can to protect our globe. This year we are waiting until it gets a bit warmer before turning on the air conditioning”.

What I learned from this project is that there is no such thing as a lesser customer. Spandana ranks among my top 5 customers in terms of vision, and clarity of what they want in a solution. The demarcation of who is going to do what was very clear from the beginning, so there were no surprises. While I helped her with the technology framework and programming for the site, she was in total charge of content creation, overall vision of the site, and identification of the different components she wanted to see on the site. We created the site using Joomla! and it was a very pleasant experience. By the way, I highly recommend Joomla! for any site that’s rich in content, and wants to leverage the richness of Open Source initiatives. Joomla! is built on the LAMP stack.

It was a moment of happiness and pride to see Spandana totally satisfied with how the site shaped up, and now she has plans ready for next set of enhancements that she will work in the summer. The clincher is that Spandana is totally self-sufficient now that she maintains and manages the site all by herself. That just makes my day as a solution provider!

Tags: customer, elementary school, global warming, Joomla, kidsDreaminGreen.com, LAMP, mill creek, Open Source, spandana, vision

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under IT Management, Joomla, Open Source, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.