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!
