Prototyping and Minimum Viable Themes

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to chat to Eric Ries about Startup Lessons Learned. Eric talks a lot about quick product launches and rapid iteration. He's coined the term: Minimum Viable Product. It is roughly defined as the least amount of work that you can do to make a product that you can test with your market. Small businesses need to test their business ideas first and foremost. Yes you need to care about SEO, usability and architecture and sales funnels. But if you've got two pages and a PayPal "buy now" button you've got enough to launch your idea. (Eric tells a great story about how their team sweated blood to get their product ready. They put the Web site together and no one clicked the link to download. Weeks earlier they could have put up a broken link and learned the same lesson and saved hundreds of hours of time.)

I teach designers and novice themers with a concept I've dubbed the Minimum Viable Theme. This is a quick site build with a little bit of content, modules installed and approximately configured and a theme with the fewest possible template files and custom functions. It may just be a base theme plus a few custom colours. The more you finalize the design outside of Drupal the harder it will be to transpose your ideas into Drupalisms. Working with a Minimum Viable Theme allows you to see what the problem areas are going to be; it allows you to theme based on user experience in a live site (rather than creating tpl.php files that you think you need); and it allows you to make modifications to your design concept OR update your project timeline to accomplish something you thought was trivial and is actually .. well .. not.

Want to learn how to stop wasting time and start working with Minimum Viable Themes? The next online Intro to Theming workshop starts July 12. Register now.