Oct 03 2008
Websites are houses too…
It’s strange how people take web development a lot less seriously than other kinds of development. When a house is being built, does the builder get told “give me a quote on a house”, and expect an answer in 5 mins? Asking something like that would get the customer laughed at to the point of embarrasment, or a large series of forms and questions relating to it:
- How many rooms?
- How many stories?
- What colour walls?
- How do you want interior decoration?
- High set house?
- …and so on
Yet a large amount of people asking for things in web development ask the simple question - “how much for a store?”, “We just want to capture information to use it in an email campaign”. Let’s focus on some of the nuances of a simple online store, to show there’s just as much thought required into scoping out requirements before being able to accurately quote things:
- Are there different categories of products, or just 1?
- What fields do you want people to be able to search on?
- Tax rates? Multi currency? Shipping?
- Do you want the user to have to sign up to the website
- What about order tracking?
- How do you want payments taken? Paypal? Saucepay? Securepay?
- Are offline payment methods available - COD, pay on pickup, invoice, direct debit?
- What do you want the store to look like? (This is a whole new can of worms - I’ll leave this one open to the designers!)
- Do you want it friendly to disabled users?
- …the list goes on!
Clearly, there’s a lot of things to work out before work on the store can really even begin. A question is, why is someone happy to start out the web presence of their business without knowing all these questions? Is there not a much larger stake in a business than in a house? Having properly defined requirements before starting a project is what makes or breaks a successfully launched e-commerce website, or any other website for that matter.
It’s well known knowledge among those of us who are on the development side of this work (and this is probably true for builders and other labour development alike) that the earlier a failure is found, the better. If it is find out in the first week that the store owner wants to be able to track people’s orders, and have multiple categories of products - then an accurate estimate can be given and a clean and maintainable design based on this will be created, which will decrease the amount of time to tweak things.
Waiting until the last week however will be catastrophic - let’s take an example if a client waited until the last week to supply product information, and only then we realised multiple categories were necessary. It previously would have been programmed in an overly simplistic way, which would have to be overhauled completely - code, design, looks, structure - everything.
Taking it back to the house analogy - imagine after bricking the house up, putting the patio in, and a sweet fireplace, the buyer is like “wait, I wanted another bedroom there!”. In come the wrecking balls and sledge hammers, because that fireplace is right in the way of where the electricals need to go.
Which leads to people changing their minds. If a painter is 90% done painting a car red, if they’re suddenly told to make it blue - well, the person paying for the painting should front that cost. Sadly, in the world of IT, these things aren’t always immediately obvious - each side of the transaction sees things their own way, and it makes it all the more difficult for both parties to come away happy.
So that’s the problem. Stay tuned for the solution.
