Words to Live By

— "The most important element professionals must remember as we approach any new project is what we do not know — thus making the second most important element, of course, become understanding exactly how to find out what we DO need to know."
 — MAESTRO CALM

Think Differently

Not only do presentation technologies and browser capabilities continue to expand in this world, but it bears remembering that the Internet differs fundamentally from all traditional print advertising methods. If you're buying ad space in a magazine, getting business cards made up, or making leaflets for distribution at the next convention, you're always dealing with issues of constrained space that almost never hinder developing company presence on the Web.

Help Thyself

You don't have to be a graphic design pro to contribute to your Web presentation. You've spent the time to develop your thoughts about your business, so you already know more than you may think about some of the more technical questions we'll address moving forward on the Web. Although we do indeed find ourselves occasionally in the position of sitting down at a very early stage in a company's development, that remains the exception to the rule around here. A majority of the time we work from client mockups, outlines, or even detailed wire-frames. As a rule, people usually come to us with fairly specific thoughts about how their site should "feel" — in addition to how it should function.

More Helpful Words

— "If you're not just competing on price or location, you are in fact competing on feeling."
— MAESTRO CALM

Consider "Optimal"

Anyone that uses the web very much at all knows the importance that the search engines play in the process. The term "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) has become an entire school of specialization in the Internet world, as a matter of fact. There are actually companies that say they'll help customers by making their web sites more "visible" to major search engines. And a few of these folks actually do a pretty good job and don't cost you a year of college tuition to hire them. No matter which company you may choose, however, they will all come back with some structural advice about what you need to do to "change" your site to make it "better" in SEO terms. Obviously, Web Dot Calm stays abreast of industry trends, not only so you don't have to go out and hire some other company to do this little part of web development, but also so that even if you decide to (and we'll share our opinions on anything you ask us about) then we'll be in a position to assess and implement their suggestions, should we all decide them to be "good" ideas. Having a collection of eyes looking at trying to achieve equivalent SEO goals certainly can't hurt anything, as long as you don't pay too much for it.

Really Helpful Words

— "If you can't be a help, at least don't be a hindrance."
— MAESTRO'S MOM

Again About Artwork

We actually took all of the flower pictures you see on this page, and then did the Illustrator and Flash work to make them look the way they do. We should mention that design “purists” say one should "never" use clip art anymore. Yeah, well. Whatever.

More Because We Care

Because we have some room in this column, we thought we'd give one final "consideration" to the use of clever and entertaining graphic art in web presentation. If for example we had used the following image in the header of this document, it would have given a very different "feeling" to the page, and when it comes down to it, the way people "feel" about you on the web can make a lot of difference.

A King's Ransom

You see, people overly concerned with following "The Rules" run the risk of forgetting why the rule came about in the first place, and that can be just about as bad. Don't you just hate those days when you want to yell out, "Hey, The Emperor has no clothes, y'all."

 

YET ANOTHER WebDotCalm INTRODUCTION

This is an actual copy of the exact page we put together for a client that had rather ambitious plans for taking a successful retail operation onto the web. In going through our outline of WebDotCalm, it seemed to fit a lot of situations where people might be considering some things. At the very least, we hate to waste effort. That always seems sad. And with that beginning, see if any of this might apply to you …

 

Just recall that you asked for this. Oddly, the web is a dandy place to put complicated documents because we can set up "links" to different areas. As you're going through this (hopefully a few times) you can just use the red section headings in the list below to jump down to that section. Each section also has a link to bring you back to that index.

OK. This will be long, but you ask complicated questions and then want me to WRITE; well, you can figure what will happen.

Web development for a retail application (very) basically comes in five stages:

Now, all I’ll have to do is elaborate on those. As best I can I’ll try to set up each section with what we NEED in order to go forward in that area. Also, I know you’re concerned about time (and therefore money) so I’ll give you a “guesstimate” on those areas. I think in hours, not really days or weeks, so that’s what you’ll get. I work a whole lot of hours in a week, and I do have people that can help me in most areas. As for the “out of pocket” expenses area, PLEASE PREFACE EVERY ESTIMATE WITH "IT DEPENDS" — on what you want, on how much time we have, on how brave you want to be, things like that. I’ll give you numbers assuming we're going with as tricked out of a system as I think we need to be to keep the Wow Factor working, but not necessarily everything in the “this would be really, really cool if we could …” area. Also please remember that to a certain extent this can be much more of an “art” than a “science” despite what you’d probably think.

[We actually deleted the dollars line items for use here in WebDotCalm, because every situation differs and thus even an hourly "rate" in one circumstance may not mean much in another. We do give quotes in actual dollars, though, as soon as we understand the project well enough. Clients seem to like that. … Interesting people, clients.]

STRUCTURE & PHYSICAL SETUP
Time Estimate: 30 hours

Like any intricate process, we need to be completely on the same page. We need to actually decide where we’re going to physically put the site and then determine the server setup we need. By far my preference would be to put it on my servers because I know with 100% certainty that I have complete root access to those machines. We can configure the PHP, Flash Servers, whatever in exactly the way we want, and we can add and subtract at will without moving the entire group of sites.

There are a huge number of geeky things we need to do just as a functional aspect. If I know exactly where we’re going here I can’t tell you how much time (money) we’ll save going forward. We already have a lot of the code and scripts built from other clients, but we still need to customize a great deal, particularly when it comes to Message Boards and Mailing List applications. We don’t need to “buy” all the software, but we don’t want to waste time doing things again if we make a big change.

Back to the INDEX

STATIC — but WOW — SITE
Time Estimate: 200 - 400 hours

 

I know this is a big range, but a great deal of the "meat" of a web site comes in developing the front-end application itself. Sometimes you'll hit a groove and the coding just seems to fly, but that's not the usual way things turn out. A lot of different software applications come into play here. In addition to the xhtml, the Photoshop can be very time consuming, as can the javascript and Flash.

If we do this well, it becomes massively more simple to go forward with everything for design modifications to the ultimate goal of making this "dynamic" and thus auto-updating from uploads that you can do yourselves. As I've told you, as we work in the XML functionality, you'll be able to completely revise any or all of the sections just by learning where to put the images and knowing how to save and upload files out of Excel.

Because of the "foundational" nature of this area, I almost always do it first. Everything builds from here and we'll learn a lot about what you like (and need) in a very practical sense after we get the static site launched and you begin to see its strengths and limitations. You'll also begin to get feedback from customers and that will help us a lot with enhanced functions too.

Obviously, unless you're planning on learning a fairly significant bit of Dreamweaver (or any other coding software that can generate xhtml), I'll need to be doing the updates during this initial phase. As a practical matter we can do whatever photography (and video) needs we have in this area too. Sometimes we like excuses to avoid a computer monitor for a few days.

Back to the INDEX

ONLINE STORE
Time Estimate: 100 hours

First off, the time estimate assumes we've already done a lot of the foundational work in the previous section. I do these things in a specific order because I've learned that each new area builds from the earlier efforts.

That said, no one really builds stores from scratch anymore. There are simply too many options, and the PHP code (most commonly, although there are others) can take hundreds of hours to build from scratch. There are literally thousands and thousands of lines of code and you're talking about not only the "client" side, the part that your customers actually see online, but at least as importantly, the administration section which allows you to track sales, add/delete items, and generally make the store operate as a money-making enterprise.

Consequently you have sort of a big range of "start-up" cost options. Which way we go really depends on how much of a focus you're going to be giving this area and what kind of tracking, "specials" and various other retail practices you're going to want to employ online.

It will be much easier to go over these options when we sit down at the same table, but we don't need to wait until we get "to" this point before we can start making some decisions. For example, understanding how your "main" site will interface with the catalog will really help you visualize the operation and help make decisions. Clearly the design aspects of the last phase, as well as the primary structure breakdown will help shape the fully expanded online catalog. While I'm thinking of it, we should talk about whether you're always going to fulfill within your own company or if you're ever going to drop-ship some online sales. That makes a difference in how we set up and which software direction we go too.

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DYNAMIC DEVELOPMENT
Time Estimate: 100 - 200 hours

The ultimate plan in any operation like this is to allow you to do the vast majority of any updates yourselves, from day to day "item sold" kinds of issues to creating entirely new sales areas and seasonal adjustments. Again, if we do the static site properly, the modification into a dynamic application becomes much more simple. The variance in the initial costs rests entirely on which server software we're going to employ in our development. Obviously, this depends not only on how much "technical" expertise you've developed, but also which servers we're using.

For example, it's probably "easier" to build a Cold Fusion model from a matching design and administrative point of view, simply because I use Adobe products almost exclusively, and they're all developed to work with each other as seamlessly as possible. Cold Fusion is an Adobe application. Still, we'd need to buy a CF Server and install it for you specifically to make this possible.

We can use PHP, which is Open Source (and therefore free) for all of this too, and a great many of the modules we'll want to implement are commercially available for relatively small costs. Any customization for our use within this language, though, "might" be relatively expensive. There are always trade-offs. We use PHP for almost all of our clients if that tells you anything.

As I said earlier, we'll learn a lot in the few weeks that it takes to get to this point, and that will make our decisions a lot easier to make here. It may not look like it from the way I've broken down the hours and costs guesstimates in this section, but this is by far the area with the greatest potential for massive understatement. All of the web is going toward this type of utilization, but "the masses" aren't there yet so we don't have much in the way of handy-dandy "this is how you do this" sort of instructions, even on the geek sites. About 95% of the different type of web designers I know, for example, would probably have taken upwards of a week just to build this page properly and with standards compliance. It took maybe a couple of extra hours to do the coding and graphics work here, but it made this a whole lot easier to read. AND you don't have to carry around an email printout if you ever want to refer back to it. Try not to do that if you're just going to show me how wrong I was, though. OK?

Back to the INDEX

WHAT'S NEXT?
Time Estimate: 0 - 10,000 hours

It's not complicated at this point. Up to now I've just been sort of playing with various design, code, and plugin applications, just to see where we might be going some time. Maybe.

Honestly I've got to get this set up on the server the site's ultimately going to live on in order to really get going on the detail work. As with everything valuable, nuance and attention to detail will serve to separate us from ignominy. And even if you don't use that word very often, it doesn't really sound like something you'd stand next to, now does it?

I've been doing this for about eight years now professionally, and even after all that time it's really had to draw any firm "conclusions" about how clients "usually" do something, because there are simply too many variables to make convenient categories. Technology — and the economy — have changed a whole heck of a lot in that time. That said, "most" of the "companies" (as compared to "project" sorts of things like specific movies, that sort of thing) still use a "monthly maximum" approach to our billing. It actually works well for both of us that way, since they know the most they'll be spending in any given month, and if I know we're going to hit that level early on, I'm free to spend time doing the sorts of, "Gee. Let's try this and see if it works," type of experimentation that eventually results in the most effective sites. Most people would be aghast at the number of hours we'll spend just moving things a pixel at a time until they work on the screen like they do in our heads. Geeks are strange. Face it.

Also up until now I've just been fitting in work on this development when I have a few hours or a weekend free. I don't mind continuing in just that fashion, you know that already. Somewhere in this world friendship still needs to count for something.

Sadly, my mortgage company doesn't really seem to care how much fun I'm having in life, though and neither does American Express, those heathens. At least now you'll have some idea of how much "time" I think it will take to work through your specific situation. We can decide what to do from there. My only advice as a friend would be to NOT just use an a la carte "hourly" approach with something as nebulous as web development. That's fine for smaller, well-defined, projects, but none of us wants to face those demons at the end of every month when we're building something from scratch.

Even if I'm not billing per se for something, I still keep track of the hours I spend on a project. I'm not as religious as I should be on the free ones, but it's a good habit to keep up. Clients always want time sheets of some sort even if they're paying what looks like a "flat fee" to them, and it's always good for us internally to be able to look back and see how long something took if we're ever looking at recreating it. I do have the Excel sheet I've "sort of" been keeping up since we first talked about your project if you ever want to see it. You'll laugh. Or maybe cry. People have different reactions.

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