I’ll let you fly the plane. You let me build the website.

– Robert Kruger 11 June 2010

When planning your next website, I’m sure this question will be asked: “How long will this take.” We get that question a lot. The answer is difficult, if not impossible. Here’s why: we can only know how long it will take to do our part. When you decide to rework your site (or to build a website for the first time), you will talk with various professionals you intend to include in the process, but you will also list the part of the project that you will handle yourself. This process is ubiquitous in the process of website development.

I understand the reasons why the work gets divided between the trained, seasoned professionals and the staff of the site owner. Your site wouldn’t be yours if you were completely uninvolved. I do believe that.

The difficulty with the question “How long will this take?” is that we don’t know how you work, and because you don’t work on websites every day, you don’t know either. Here are some real-world examples:

• A site owner chose to let their agency design their website and we did the implementation. The site owner was going to do the copywriting and content entry. It was a fairly complex site, but it didn’t have tons of content - a copywriter would probably have charged a few thousand dollars to write everything. Seven months passed between the time that the site was built (ready for content entry) and go-live. It took the site owner’s staff that long to write the copy. It’s probably the first time they ever wrote a website, and they were busy doing their jobs before the website project came along.
• One site owner chose to provide HTML code to us rather than pay us for that service. The frontend (HTML) coder they used was probably cheaper that us, but what would have taken us days to complete took months.
• On a recent project, the site owner opted to do all content entry. That’s a fairly common decision because content entry is non-technical, time-consuming work. Content entry is easy in Dialogs, so it’s a great way for the site owner to keep costs down. Actually, it’s pretty rare for content entry to be included in our scope of work. It’s usually done by the copywriter or the site owner. Back to this case study, we conducted a training session to show several staffers how Dialogs works and how to do content entry. After a month, the owner of the company asked me how the website was progressing. I had to report that none of the staffers had logged in to the website after the training session. He acknowledged that they had been very busy.

None of these examples include any wrong-doing or bad decision-making. They simply show that inexperienced participants in the web development process create completely unpredictable timelines. Even if a staffer has the ability to perform a task, they may not have the time. That marketing intern may contribute an article every month to the company newsletter, but they may be overwhelmed by trying to write 50 pages of website copy.

Do what you do, and don’t do what you don’t do. Regardless of the task at hand, it will get done better by someone with training and experience.

By the way … we follow our own advice. We hired a creative agency to design Dialogs.com. We planned the site, and we implemented it. That’s what we are good at. We didn’t design it. We took the same path when we created AmberBeanCoffee.com as our sandbox site. If a customer needs an iPhone version for their Dialogs website, no problem. If they want an actual iPhone app, we bring in an expert to guide the project toward success, and we work on the app’s integration to the customer’s Dialogs content.

We all have heard that time is money. Well, you can turn that around. If a predictable go-live date is critical for your next website, money can buy you time.

Dialogs Professional Services can handle every aspect of web development. We fill the gaps in technical capabilities and available resources for you and your creative agency. Your website can be done on time.