What is the quickest way from a concept to a site?

Question

I've got a bunch of website ideas and I was wondering what is the quickest way to get from a pretty thorough concept definition (idea mind-maps, use-cases, architecture diagrams ) to a working website. The only point is to get to something that's functional, not worrying about performance. The idea is to get something out to showcase a functional site, and after worry about fine-tuning or re-writing parts if necessary.

I am familiar with quite a few web frameworks from open-source and proprietary world, but I could not find so far a swiss-army-knife of web development environments that can get you fast from a concept to a working site. I was kinda wondering if there is such a thing, free or non-free

Looking forward to your suggestions...

UPDATE: The question might get a bit too metaphoric for the kind readers of this site, but I'm at a moment where I feel that implementation details are killing my creativity ... maybe you'll laugh or you'll feel offended, I'm just wondering if anyone can give me a useful hint..

Answer 1

First, select a dynamic scripting language. Static types and compilation will slow development. PHP is a good choice since you can download a LAMP package like xampp and start immediately.

Next, use a CMS if at all possible. If you require a flexible front end design, then choose a template focused CMS like Expression Engine. If your site can be relatively generic looking, then use something like Drupal.

If you require the flexibility of a framework, how much time can you spend learning it? You'll get up to speed with CodeIgniter or Kohana quickly. Other frameworks can save time with behind-the-scenes magic, but you can lose flexibility and the learning curve is steep expensive.

Answer 2

Assuming your site is sufficiently unique enough that it cannot be done with something off the shelf (CMS, blog, open source, etc) then your next best bet to get the site done quickly is to use a programming framework such as asp.net, RoR, Django, Wicket. You mentioned Coldfusion and that's a possibility too.

Which framework you use depends on you. In many cases the framework will have ways to cut down development time by giving you functionality in controls/functions or generating code for you. asp.net has a dynamic data scaffolding-like feature that will build a generic "admin" interface for your database.

Another way to speed up development time is to use an IDE that uses a GUI to build your site. Some IDEs like this include Dreamweaver and Visual Studio.net (or Visual Web Developer). Using these IDEs you can build your site almost without touching any code.