Brilliant Thinking

One of the things that constantly surprises me is the sheer number of poor websites out there. I’m not talking about design here, although that’s also an issue, but the completely poor implementation standard that many sites adopt or are burdened with.

The problem has many contributing factors:

1. The client is not a web expert, technologicially or otherwise, so they seek a supplier who can build them one.
2. The supplying web agency does not fill in the blanks in the clients’ knowledge to ensure that they have a complete specification in order to produce a quality product. Sure, the website will work and appear to deliver what the requirements said, but will it be fit for purpose now and in the future?
3. Many of the products that web agencies promote (for example content management systems) are updated versions of products built on old standards which do not comply with todays standards-based approach to web development. The result is buggy code which doesn’t work on all browsers and all operating systems.
4. Many web browsers are actually very tolerant of bad code and manage to display things as they should be. However, newer browsers such as FireFox, Safari and Opera do not have the legacy of the “browser wars” era when browsers were trying to compete with each other on feature sets, and so people using these browsers can easily get shut out of your website. As we mentioned in another article on FireFox, more people are choosing not to use legacy browsers and so compliance is important in new website builds.

So who is to blame?

With the contributing factors you could blame the client, but why should they become experts in order to ensure that a project is delivered properly? After all, isn’t that why they’re hiring the web agency?

Shouldn’t the web agency educate the client or make sure that a quality product is produced since they are the experts? Ideally yes, but this puts the price up and makes an agency “less competitive” since the client isn’t full conversant with web technology in order to fully differentiate between agencies, so the agency shoots itself in the foot by raising it’s head above the bar!

Shouldn’t the tools be re-written to make them standards compliant? Nice idea, but that takes time (and it is happening, but slowly), and increases development costs which ultimately get passed along to the end retail price. In some product areas, margins are tight and competition is high, so change is slow.

So how do you find a good agency that’s going to deliver the project that’s not only fit for purpose but compliant with the necessary standards? How do you make sure that the project you’re going to pay good money for isn’t going to be mutton dressed as lamb?

Enter our Web Surveyor.

In the building trade, a surveyor is a person who ensures that the client’s requirements are translated into a compliant specification that can then be tendered to agencies for completion. The involvement of the surveyor ensures that the process is followed consistently, that all the little details are covered and included and that any issues, objections or changes are reflected and managed through to completion. In the web trade, this role slips down the cracks - often the client assumes that’s what the web agency does, and often the web agency assumes that the client will manage all the details.

So why do you need one?

At Emissary, we often take on clients who have had a very bad experience with their previous company because nobody was looking after things the way they should have been - ie being the web surveyor - and so they need a “web rescue”. This usually results in a complete rebuild of the site which could have been avoided had the original web agency followed due diligence when building the site originally. We use a 7-stage checklist to cover each of the areas necessary to ensure a quality delivery, which is why we’ve been calling ourselves “internet architects” for a while now, and I’ll cover these in a future article.

This view isn’t solely my own, but is shared by the wider industry at large - for example, Peter Abrahams also wrote on the topic today on it-director.com. This is one of the frustrations I had with the web industry that prompted me to set up Emissary - ie provide brilliant service and brilliant solutions, not just satisfactory ones, and we have been fortunate enough to work as a “web surveyor” with clients to help them specify or refine their requirements which have then either been given to other web development agencies or developed by our team.

To summarise:

• The web surveyor helps you get the right result first time
• The web surveyor understands the client’s business needs and balances this with cost and quality
• The web surveyor acts on behalf of the client
• The web surveyor understands web technology and web design principles, including user interfaces, hosting, coding and search engines
• The web surveyor ensures consistency and repeatability in the process and in the results
• The web surveyor acts as a facilitator first, a manager second and arbiter third
• The web surveyor translates between business and technology

Full Article: June 2005 Web Server Survey

64,808,485 sites and climbing! That’s an increase of 1.27 million from last month and 7.83 million sites since the start of the year. Apache continues to outstrip Microsoft by almost 4 to 1 in terms of developers community and number of active hosted sites.