Klausi's Dilema

I was reminded of an interesting fundamental truth of website development. Two minimum components of building a website are the person who is going to build & develop the website - and the person who is paying the bill and will own the website, typically a business owner. In theory these make up a good team, the business owner knows the business and what they want - and the website developer knows the technology and how to deliver a website. Put the two together and you have a great website and a profitable business. At least that's the theory.

In practice creating a website requires that the developer knows the business. S/he knows what the business has been, what it is today and where it is going. This same person knows the customers who might visit the website and their expectations of the business. However that is only the start. The website developer has to get inside the business owners head. They have to have plentiful access to a variety of bumf and other documentation and also the people in charge of various aspects of the business that are selected for exposure as a website.

The developer then has to be able to go away and interpret such information and put it all together as a "cost-effective" project that delivers on all the technology points, including browser compatability, search engine friendliness, innovative & unique design elements, consistent navigation methodology, etc etc, But for now I want to ignore all the geeky parts - and concentrate on the human element.

Going back to the beginning you have to ask can the web designer ever know their customer's business? Obviously that is a challenge. In fact it is a huge challenge fraught with several pitfalls. The biggest of which is extracting the core message of the website out of the business owner.

You see most often the business owner doesn't know what they actually want. often they do not know how the web works. They often may be unable to enunciate key elements that are important to the web designer. And often reliance on documentation leaves huge gaping holes. It would be nice to think that the faults in communication can be laid at the door of lack of time. While the business owner and key executives may be under extraordinary time pressures that is not the real bottleneck.

The real bottleneck in a business owner being able to commission an effective (in the business owner's terms) website is the problem of being on a completely different planet to the web designer. They are often chalk and cheese. And no matter what the web designer comes up with the web site will be wrong. The colour will be wrong, the buttons too large, stub pages with text "waiting to be filled"... The list is endless.

To help emphasise the monunental challenge a website is a personal thing. Nothing works worse than an impersonal website that takes traditional advertising bumf and replays it in web format. Corporate bumf must always be impersonal, a website never. This is because corporate bumf can never be targetted at anything better than a type of customer, whereas the website must always have an individual real person in focus. The challenge for a website designer is to get inside that difference and bring something out that satisfies the business owner.

And that is Klausi's dilema. The web designer's nightmare is to sit in front of their favourite webdesign tool and "create" a personal statement from the business owner in graphical and textual format. Sure they can create, but will the creation be relevant? How long will the web designer have to wait for the business owner deliver of text for key pages? Will they have to spend extra hours manipulating images and making them suitable for web visitor consumption. Will it satisfy? Will it come within budget to keep the business owner happy - and the website developer a profit.

posted by Andy Swarbrick/PopG at 9:39