Stories from the web development trenches.

– Robert Kruger 12 May 2010

We thought it would be fun to share some of the notable successes and failures we have seen over the course of building websites. No names, just examples. We plan to do this periodically in this blog. Please share your war stories with us - we'll anonymously publish the juicy ones (with your permission).

Experience can make or break a project. It can certainly make or break a budget. We worked on a project where the site owner was the micro-managing type. They had a limited budget and a short timeline. They insisted that they could manage the project and choose the team to create their website, without our assistance. Here’s the team they assembled: the producer was an employee of the site owner who had never produced a website before, the designer had design experience, but not in website design, the front-end coder was a relative of an employee of the site owner, and no one was assigned responsibility for the video that was supposed to tell the whole marketing story of the company.

What was the result? The deadline was missed by close to a year, and the total cost of the project was far higher than it needed to be.

We received the design (to start implementation) six months after the proposed go-live date, and our billables on the project were several times more than our billables to other, more experienced customers for projects of similar size. The fact that our costs went up so dramatically is the most significant lesson to be learned. We sat in meeting after meeting reviewing the same information over and over. We spent dozens of hours in phone calls and writing emails explaining to everyone on the team their job responsibilities.

Here’s an example of the opposite scenario. We recently had the pleasure of working with an entire team of experienced professionals on a fairly substantial project.

The site owner recognized that their project was fairly complex, so they hired a very experienced agency. One meeting we attended included a producer, a user-interface designer, a graphic designer, a copywriter, a frontend coder, backend coders, and an account manager. In one brief meeting, the entire implementation team had all the information they needed to do their jobs. Nothing technical had to be explained to anyone; everyone already knew how to do their job.

The results of this project were very different from the first story. The entire project (Discovery through Implementation) took less time than the first team needed just to get an approved design, even though the first example was a brochure site with just a handful of pages and the second example was a highly complex presentation of hundreds of pages that were tagged for filtering and included complex architecture where content appeared in varying ways on multiple pages.

Experience has value. An experienced professional really can be the better value, even if their hourly rate is higher than that of a green rookie. Not only can the seasoned pro do the same amount of work in much less time (a higher hourly rate does not always mean a higher total cost), and the final product will likely be better. The worst choice is often assigning a task to an employee with no experience. The flawed logic is: since an employee is already on the payroll, they aren’t really costing anything. Of course they cost something. They draw a paycheck. They will be pulled off of other tasks to try to learn their new assignment, reducing productivity in other areas. Worst of all, they may not ever be able to complete the task they have been assigned, leaving the rest of the team sitting on their hands.

Dialogs Professional Services provides expertise to web projects. Our expertise is not limited to Dialogs development - we are also experienced at translating business processes to web practices, making online business more profitable.