by Steven
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!
Continue reading “Websites are houses too…”
Tags: model, process, programming, requirements, scope creep, specification
by Steven
Why integrate, when we can use a big single system to do everything?
The answer is simple – smaller niche applications do a single role much better than huge applications do every role. What’s better for blogging; blogger or geocities? Would you use hotmail or cpanel to organise do your email?
But it’s very annoying to go around to every site – updating blogger when you want to talk about some news, logging in to gmail when you want to send an email, logging in to your webstore when you want to update product prices – all these logins, passwords and starkly different interfaces can get overwhelming quickly!
Bring in the power of integration – what if all of your blogger posts would automatically show on your main website frontpage? What if you could post on blogger using the same administration area as you do when you update your webstore? What if, whenever you logged in to your website administration section, you were also logged in to blogger, so you could get there and do the more advanced functions at the click of a button?
You wind up getting the best of both worlds! One centralised interface, one username and password, one place to log in – unlimited access to the various applications and frameworks out there. And it’s virtually unlimited – any application with a published API can theoretically be added to the mix!
Tags: Development, integration, interoperability