:: Volume 6, Issue 10 - November, 2006 ::

'While I was raking our lawn free of leaves last weekend I flashed-back to my days as a high school student raking neighborhood lawns for a little spending money and how much easier it got to do the job the more often I did it. Then I had an epiphany --- raking leaves is like developing websites & software! Read on to see just where my thoughts led me.

ZEN & THE ART OF WEB DESIGN

Too many website owners get disappointed with the cost and/or delivery of their web project. Most often this happens when either one or both of the client and the developer have little experience in the process.

Let's take a Zen-like look at a typical web/software project:

A proprietor has a lawn and needs the leaves raked so he asks a young sweeper, "How long would it take you to rake my lawn?"

The sweeper replies "How big is your lawn?"

"I don't know," answers the proprietor.

"Then I don't know, either," says the sweeper.

The proprietor goes away, measures his lawn and determines that he has a hundred square metres of lawn. When he tells the young sweeper, the sweeper estimates "About two hours". So, the proprietor agrees to have the sweeper rake his lawn.

Two hours later though, the lawn is not finished. "Why are you not done?" the proprietor asks the sweeper.

He gives a solemn look, and replies "Because a breeze picked up and started to blow the leaves around".

"Why didn't you bag the leaves as you went along?"

"I didn't think of that," replies the sweeper.

In the end, it takes the sweeper over three hours to rake the lawn which he originally said would take two hours.

So what went wrong? Two things:

1. The proprietor did not ask for what he wanted. After all, he didn't want a sweeper to rake his lawn for two hours --- he wanted a lawn with no leaves on it.
2. The sweeper lacked experience and did not take into consideration all potential circumstances. Although he can rake 100 square metres in two hours, this is based on doing the work in an unchanging environment, a vacuum, as it were. As we all know, in the real world, things never work out exactly as planned. Two hours of practiced time can take three to five hours in real life. The experienced sweeper would know this and account for it in his estimate.

This creates a pricing conundrum which is shared in the web development world. If the sweeper had quoted five hours to rake the lawn, the proprietor probably would not have used him. He would have instead searched for the sweeper who said he can do it in two hours, and then had the exact same problem that he had here.

The experienced lawn owner and the experienced sweeper should both know the nature of raking leaves, and should both understand that to do the job properly may take longer than expected. What may appear to be a higher estimate of five hours at the end of the day may in fact be done in less time and at less cost and aggravation than paying the cheaper sweeper to keep going until the job is eventually completed. It won't do the proprietor any good to get the cheapest/less-experienced sweeper because, in the long run, was he really cheaper?

The moral of this story: It's important that the proprietor be clear on what he really wants accomplished at the end of the day and he must further understand how much he is prepared to spend to get the job done correctly.

To put this in web development terms, if spending less is more important than getting a properly engineered website, then it is important that the website owner tells the developer up front "you have two hours to get done what you can - and what is not done, we must either live without or pay more for the full job."

Always ask yourself "What is the real goal?", and build your plan around the answer.

Did you know...

Globi Web Solutions is proud to announce that we have been selected to receive the World Wide Web Awards Gold Award in our Development of www.PayHalf.com.

We are equally proud to announce that we have recently been selected to also receive a World Wide Web Awards Silver Award for our development of www.InkedSales.com and a Bronze Award for our development of www.CulinarianStaffing.com.

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Globi Web Solutions
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Reprinted with permission from Globi Web Solutions, a leading Website Design and Development Company based in Calgary. For further resources and information, go to globi.ca. Copyright © 2010 Globi Web Solutions.