A Website is a Conversation

When my colleague John upgraded our Quickbooks accounting system yesterday, a shortcut appeared on his desktop--"Create your own website", which linked to yet another money-grab: pick a template, add your content and voilà, you have a website (only $9.99 per month after the free 3-month trial). There are numerous such services around, and  even the creator of  Drupal, the website content management / development platform we deploy here at Web Networks, is starting an instant site service. I have dreamed of them myself. But after over 12 years of working on website development projects with non-profit, social enterprise and government clients, and trying different "insta-site" applications, I'm more convinced that it is a fool's quest to try to eliminate the initial and ongoing conversations that take place between the client and the website building team, and that no application is ever going to be able to offer, out of the box, a simple and usable system that can deliver even basic organization sites.

Take this page we built for the Elementary Teachers of Toronto. It all starts with a simple client request: a page listing our Executive and Executive officers. But the complexity is in the sorting requirements: a) The Executive displayed separate from the Officers; b)The Executive sorted with President first, and then alphabetically; c) the Executive Officers sorted alphabetically; d) the images listing horizontally; e) the images linking to a bio of the individual.

Drupal handles such requirements with a plug-in called "Views". The interface for this page looks like this:

And that's just part of it. First the View needs to be created. Even our most advanced clients, and we have a few, and all of our clients are getting more and more savvy, would find it difficult at best to navigate through Drupal Views configuration.

Ok, well how about a system running on an iPad allowing anyone to drag and drop items? Ok, fine for the first time, but every new item would have to be dragged and inserted into the current list manually. Databases bring a human logic to multiple items which mirrors how organizations structure themselves and their knowledge, and attempts to mirror a sensible way of thinking: ordering alphabetically, sorting by categories, for example. But setting up and configuring databases is more difficult than programming a thermostat, or your VCR / DVD: thus the need to work with someone (in-house or hired) with at least intermediate technical skills.

The "agile" approach to development extends this approach by saying: forget about even planning--we'll just agree on the top level requirements, build and release prototypes iteratively, discuss the next focus for development, and charge by the hour. Most projects proceed that way anyway, but in fact most clients cannot work without a fixed price. 

Please give me a call or send me an e-mail if you'd like to start a conversation on your next information technology project!

-Oliver Zielke 416.596.0212 x.25, oliver@web.net