I clearly remember the first time I saw the images of a solitary Terry Fox on the news as a young Canadian; I was immediately in awe of his dedication and determination that he exhibited in his 1980 attempt to cross Canada. His message and life were celebrated today with the announcement of a new one dollar coin that will go into circulation on April 4, 2005. The spirit of Terry Fox lives on as each year more than 60 countries around the world hold Terry Fox Runs to raise funds for local cancer treatment. This young man born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, truly signifies how one person can make a significant global impact.
I encourage you to visit the Terry Fox website at http://www.terryfoxrun.org/ and be inspired by his story.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Who owns the website project?
What is the age-old question of website development? Plainly put, should the entire website be a software development project, a marketing project, or a combination of the two? We have struggled with this at my company and the pendulum seems to swing each way every three or so years.
Recently we had a consultant develop an entire website based on an extremely heavy-weight CMS tool from Microsoft, which we thought would solve many of our problems as far as content management and workflow. What the CMS tool did solve was the need for a developer to constantly maintain and tweak the structure and functionality of the site; what was lost was the granular control of the site as we were forced into a complex system of templates and strict formatting. I'll admit that we were a little naive in our approach to this problem, and as usual we are guilty of trying to adopt a big company solution for our small company needs, however if you can consider the costs as sunk, and get past the notion of failure, it was actually a very good learning experience.
From a content author's point of view, the CMS tool and WYSIWYG interface was fantatsic, there was even some ability to make structural/navigation changes without having to get deep into DHTML or C++,... it was liberating for a quasi-techie like myself. The drawback was that to develop a new template, for example a submission form, I needed to enlist a developer who was familiar with IIS, SQL, .NET, and C++. In addition, the developer had to "learn" the specific idiosyncrasies of the CMS tool and have the ability to build the whole website as an application. Not an easy task when our core competency is developing commercial engineering software, and not websites!
Needless to say we have since started from scratch developing the new site in-house using our own people and tools that we are familiar with. It is now firmly a "software project" which is just fine with me, as long as it has priority from time-to-time over our commercial products.
So if you hear someone say "we need to re-do our whole website", and they can't give you solid proof that shows visitors to your website are having a negative experience, then consider carefully what your response should be. A website has more than just a cool factor, or a look and feel associated with it; a website is an application, and you'd better have a damn good reason to go mucking with the UI and functionality because you could give your visitors (end-users) an even worse experience than that are currently having. And a poor reputation is a very difficult thing to shake.
Recently we had a consultant develop an entire website based on an extremely heavy-weight CMS tool from Microsoft, which we thought would solve many of our problems as far as content management and workflow. What the CMS tool did solve was the need for a developer to constantly maintain and tweak the structure and functionality of the site; what was lost was the granular control of the site as we were forced into a complex system of templates and strict formatting. I'll admit that we were a little naive in our approach to this problem, and as usual we are guilty of trying to adopt a big company solution for our small company needs, however if you can consider the costs as sunk, and get past the notion of failure, it was actually a very good learning experience.
From a content author's point of view, the CMS tool and WYSIWYG interface was fantatsic, there was even some ability to make structural/navigation changes without having to get deep into DHTML or C++,... it was liberating for a quasi-techie like myself. The drawback was that to develop a new template, for example a submission form, I needed to enlist a developer who was familiar with IIS, SQL, .NET, and C++. In addition, the developer had to "learn" the specific idiosyncrasies of the CMS tool and have the ability to build the whole website as an application. Not an easy task when our core competency is developing commercial engineering software, and not websites!
Needless to say we have since started from scratch developing the new site in-house using our own people and tools that we are familiar with. It is now firmly a "software project" which is just fine with me, as long as it has priority from time-to-time over our commercial products.
So if you hear someone say "we need to re-do our whole website", and they can't give you solid proof that shows visitors to your website are having a negative experience, then consider carefully what your response should be. A website has more than just a cool factor, or a look and feel associated with it; a website is an application, and you'd better have a damn good reason to go mucking with the UI and functionality because you could give your visitors (end-users) an even worse experience than that are currently having. And a poor reputation is a very difficult thing to shake.
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