Who ever said it was simple?

Meeting the challenges of setting up and maintaining an effective web site

With a copy of MS-FrontPage and the free web space given by an Internet Service Provider, you can publish your first pages on the internet within minutes: pictures, text, links: easy-peasy!

There is an intuitive over-simplification about the skills, resources and effort which need to be brought together to build and run an effective website. It causes companies and company departments to launch into web projects with insufficient planning and management oversight; under-estimate time and budgets; and over-estimate their capacity to hold all the required skills in-house.

As the realities of experience dawn, too often this over-simplification results in despair: at worst a wasted investment, at best the gloomy realisation that the web site is not all it could be. Lost opportunities, lost customers, being constrained by bad decisions made early on in the design process.

It need not be so. Effective web sites can be achieved with modest investment in development and maintenance. If the pit-falls are well understood from the outset and the right planning and resourcing decisions are put in place, there is no reason your web site cannot meet your highest expectations.

If you think an effective web site is a piece of cake, read on and see how that view holds up. If you're coming to this article with a bitter dose of past experience read further and see how the future could be brighter.

A Short Dose of Reality

One of the first mistakes made by companies large and small is to under-estimate the number of skills required to make the their web site dreams come true; and this generally results in trying to achieve too much within their own company or their own department. So what's the big deal? ... Programmers will take care of the coding, and an author will take care of the content. Are you sure?

Skills and Cost Effective Development

The range of internet technologies required to build a significant site is too broad for a couple of programmers to be an expert in all areas. And a small pool of expertise is a major vulnerability if one person is on holiday or off sick. What is more, it takes more than programming skills to build a web site. Business analysis and program design, graphic design, server administration and security, network architecture, usability and fulfilment of legal requirements. Each of these is a core skill in its own right, and it takes a substantial organisation to meet all of them in-house.

But let's say you've got the expertise you need to build a site. They're proficient in the manifold technologies to build a web site and you're in a big corporate environment with all the back-up you require. The problem you're next likely to face is cost and efficiency.

Are the web applications you're demanding really so unique that you have to build them yourself from scratch, or could they benefit from the economies of scale achieved by using a company which builds similar requirements for many other customers? Is your company really so well kitted that even fairly modest projects have local experts where they're needed backed up by a development team based in parts of the world where it can be carried out more cost effectively? Do you have enough in-house developers to meet your project or upgrade requirements in a realistic time frame, or will they get shelved, or make the front of the queue too late to be useful?

One of the big costs in developing a site is in testing. On an internet site your users aren't all using the same model of computer with the same screen size, running the same operating system in the same language, with the same web-browser, with the same configuration and the same plug-in applications. Do you have the resources to carry out sufficient testing? Do you even know what technologies your clients are using to access your web site? Your clients' custom and your company's reputation are at stake if your customers can't access your site properly.

Programming and Cost Effective Maintenance

If you've been reading this article secure in the knowledge that your web requirements are modest, and that you've no need of major programming, let's see how well that assumption stands up.

Developing content is expensive, time consuming and never-ending. Web design companies' web sites are full of portfolios containing a beautifully designed homepage with little and/or outdated content behind it. One click from the homepage and you're already looking at a site devoid of substance, or PDF files rapidly churned out from word processed documents, broken links, amateur presentation, and out-dated content.

There are commercial or even freeware applications available to help with some of these issues, but fitting them together generally requires customisation to a company's requirements. And even so, static content is heavy on development time, quickly goes out of date, and doesn't address the dynamic information needs of most customers. For all but the smallest businesses, information changes on a regular basis and having as much as possible updated automatically will almost always pay dividends.

Future Planning and Staged Development

Another major mistake in web site development is to define the web site by immediate requirements. If there is a three or five year plan for your business, it makes sense to use it to build a three or five year plan for your web site. Too many companies make a major investment in building a web site with very limited opportunity to adapt to future changes. It is wiser to use available budgets to do trade a little less visible functionality today, for a strong foundation for future development.

How would a web site you've been building for a couple of years cope with a company name change or change of corporate graphics? Will decisions you make today lock you into dead-end technologies and make future development difficult and expensive? What would be the implications of the software infrastructure of your web site being declared redundant by the manufacture in two years time? If you've launched into a web project without answers to questions such as these, you'd better brace yourself for the likelihood of some nasty shocks ahead.

A Brighter Future

The good news is that an effective web site is an investment, not an overhead. If implemented effectively it will certainly reduce your costs, improve your company's efficiency and give you competitive advantage. In the case of an internet site it may also, of course, provide an opportunity for new outlets and increased sales.

The keys to success lie in detailed planning, and there are four main areas to on which to concentrate.

Long Term Business Plan

A corporate web site is not a short term project. For most companies it will be one of the most important resources of the business. If your five year business plan doesn't include projections for web-based business it's time seriously to consider whether you're going to be answering your customer's requirements in five years time.

Business strategy will be formed by the evaluation of customer expectation against business efficiency.

Thus customer expectation: how will your customers want to place their orders? How will they check their accounts? How will they expect to receive their invoices? Where will they expect to find product information and support?

And business efficiency: what is the cost differential between alternative ways customers can place their orders, check their accounts, receive their invoices, get product information and support?

This evaluation can be involved: if the price differential is great but only a subset of your customers will use it, separate pricing may be required to maintain competitive delivery. But an intranet solution may reduce the cost of servicing such customers and linking your own technology with that of your suppliers' may present opportunities for supply chain savings.

Web Site Requirements Analysis

With the high level strategy in place, the requirements analysis will search for the most effective internet and intranet solutions to deliver the biggest cost savings and the maximum customer benefit. But there will also be deeper questions, for example to answer legal issues: compliance with disability legislation, the ability to roll-back your web site to a point in the past to evidence prices, specifications, terms and conditions.

Technology Analysis

An assessment of your current and future technical infrastructure involves some key decisions. You have to identify appropriate technologies to deliver your requirements in the context of a number of factors: whether your current or considered technology options will lock you into a proprietary solution and the likely cost implications of software licenses for it. Whether the technologies in which you've invested or are considering investing in will be relevant, supported or even exist in five years time.

Skills Analysis

A realistic assessment has to be made of what skills are available and accessible within your company and what has to be outsourced; of the cost of developing in-house against the cost of outsourcing.

Building the Future

The time of astronomical price tags to develop an efficient, effective web site has passed. If the right development decisions are made, Return on Investment will be swift, and if the right decisions are made you will have a mechanism for conducting business which will carry you into the future. In laying the right plans you are only as alone as you decide to isolate yourself: quality help is available at every stage.

If you found words of discomfort printed above, 2007 presents you with an opportunity. Whether you are starting a new internet/intranet site or developing from scratch, in the end it is likely to be the quality of planning which determines your success or failure.