Have you ever been in a situation where you are less than halfway through a project and 15% over budget? I have. It is not great. Lawsuits fly, fans are defiled, and I brush up on my kung-fu lest I run into an angry developer on the street. 

I was a victim of youth. I thought I knew everything. Since then, as my hair has thinned and my belly thickened, I’ve learned quite a bit about CMS installation and development in general. Here are the top three factors that blow a budget out of the water. If only I would have known then. 

Read More

I think of a website as a building. It is easy to think of it as a collection of features - big windows, an expansive lobby, a Starbucks. A company may need to impress clients, so they offer nice coffee and cookies a luxurious reception area. At the same time, they may worry about riff-raff coming in off the street to steal the cookies, so they put up a security desk. The security people will be there all day long, so they need chairs and one of those squishy pads to stand on. If you take a few steps back, the space is dictated by the people using it.

The first step in creating web requirements is to define the users, they dictate everything - functionality, IA, design, technology, content, marketing - everything.

Who Will Use The Site?

Be specific. Number one… users. Obviously. But, don’t forget internal staff - sales, marketing, editorial, IT, HR… the list goes on.

Segment The Audience

This isn’t specific enough, segment the users based on their needs. For a publishing site, they may be regular visitors browsing new content, researchers looking for insightful information regardless of when it was published, contributors wanting to add their reviews, or advertisers wanting to give you money. 

Personas Are Goofy

Many design shops will start with personas, an attempt to humanize this nameless bunch. These profiles are unabashedly goofy, and in my opinion, a giant waste of time. Here is an example: 

Read More

Remember AdLibs? They usually go something like this:

“I was [verb] on the [noun] with a [pronoun] [noun] in my [noun].”

Do kids these days know anything about this? I smell an opportunity - I’m talking to you iPad developers. 

I have a theory that requirements for most projects can be completed AdLib-style. For larger scale CMS projects, here are the sections I always include.

Read More

On the first day of the second week of business school orientation, a breakout session called “Using Sports Metaphors” was offered during lunch. Seriously. I didn’t go, I immediately called a handful of friends to have a laugh.

As it turns out, MBA programs opened a whole world of metaphors, jargon, shorthand, and other general nonsense. Boil the ocean (or nail jell-o to a tree), leverage (the verb), blamestorming, disintermediate, matrix (not the one with the red pill)… All very good. You may need to ping someone, or contact them (usually by email or IM). Outside of a nautical context, “reach out” as in, “Reach out to Bob regarding those projections,” is more widely used in formal settings.  “Low hanging fruit” is another favorite of mine - meaning the easiest task to complete, not nutritious food for little people as I found out. “Quick win” is a perfectly suitable substitute.

Toward the end of my second year, the school offered employability seminars to perform a gap analysis on their student’s resumes. There, I was introduced to words that absolutely, unequivocally should be included in a resume to monetize your education.  Top on the list was was “cross-functional teams”. For the uninitiated, this is a collection of people from different departments that need to work together to accomplish a task. In the Design world (yes, I used a capital D) we just referred to them as, “those guys” usually with a four-letter word in between, but I digress. As it turns out the phrase is pretty generic - as a use-case scenario, if you run to the bank and get some money from a teller, take a cab to a restaurant, and order a meal, you’ve just leveraged best practices to manage a cross functional team to facilitate a mission-critical project to eat a cheeseburger… no heavy lifting involved.

That being said,  cross-functional team management is essential to get anything done within big organizations. Assume you are tasked with a big project that will involve several departments - products, technology, sales, finance, etc. You need people from each to do some work but none of them work for you (or even with you for that matter). Each have different priorities, bosses and views. At any point, they can put the brakes on the project. Here are some techniques I’ve learned to exist in this type of environment.

Read More

Do you know who I hate? Cuba Gooding, Jr. Actually, I don’t know him, he seems like a nice guy, as much as someone can project this at a press junket. But, because of his Oscar Award Winning turn as Rod Tidwell, everyone over forty - especially in the technology field - feels the need to say, “Show me the money!” every time a new project up. On second thought, its not CGJ, its Cameron Crowe. I hate Cameron Crowe.*

I can forgive an occasional Austin Powers impression, but what really bugs me is that they use it in the wrong context. They mean, “How much does it cost?”

In a posting about a proprietary vs. open-source CMS,  I briefly mentioned that a cost estimate is a good, objective comparison.

License Fees

For enterprise-level** proprietary software, vendors charge in variety of ways like number of servers, number of (editorial/dev) users, amount of traffic, or just an annual flat fee. ranging from $65k - $250k. I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations, but most of the time sales people will give you a somewhat ambiguous price. For instance, they will give you a quote for the license fee, but that will only be for the production server. If you want a development and QA version of the site (and you do), you’ll need to multiply that cost by three. The one that I’m thinking about then adds another charge for concurrent users - internal staff either editing content or making changes to the code - at $13k per 10 users. 

But, wait, there’s more. You will need database servers to make the system go. A handful of systems - particularly those with a lower license fee - tend to run on Microsoft DB’s… you guessed it, more license fees. This time, it is per server, per year. So, depending on traffic, you might end up paying $50k a year for the database alone. 

Open source software, by definition, is license-free… well, sometimes. DotNetNuke, an .NET open source solution is free at a certain level. BUT, if you want an enterprise-level solution, which they define as “tested”, it will cost you $5k per production server per year. Negligible, I know, but it is still money. 

Support

Regardless of the solution you pick - even Drupal or Joomla - you will probably need a support agreement. I suppose if you have a large internal development staff, you will be OK. But, I assume if you have a large development staff, you wouldn’t be reading this, so, you need support. This is where open source solutions may be more expensive than their closed counterparts. Based on estimates I’ve seen for other companies, I’ve seen OSS service contracts go up as high as $90k a year - which includes upkeep of the core and all contributed modules. So, pretty much the whole system. 

Close source systems tend to be much cheaper on the surface - say $55k. But, these vendors don’t typically support third party modules, and if your requirements stray from what they offer out-of-the-box, chances are you’ll need some. If you integrate a Twitter module and they decide to change their API, someone will have to fix it. 

Other Stuff

A ton of other variables factor into the total cost - design, development, hardware, cloud storage - but these are really tough to quantify without solid requirements. Although it is completely wrong, just assume that they will be the same from one CMS vendor to the next. 

* In retrospect, maybe he just had a bad day. This is a great line: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”

** If your project is small, do yourself a favor and use Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. A cost comparison with a proprietary CMS does not even remotely begin to make sense until you expand to a large scale. 

It is not as if I operate in a dangerous line of work. Typically, the worst that can happen is carpal tunnel, a stiff neck, or perhaps a tension headache. I don’t want to oversell it, there were no credible treats on my life - I didn’t receive mysterious white powder in my mail box. But, I imagine there are are small group of people who, if I were in their presence, would want to cause some sort of bodily harm to me. I’ve seen enough kung fu movies to understand that they would come one at a time, and a strong punch to the sternum would incapacitate them long enough for me to run from the temple, but still…

To catch you up: a couple of years ago I relaunched a website for fishing enthusiasts. I segmented the audience and I figured out how they we would like them to interact with the site (in an ideal world). 

I’ve intentionally left out a chunk of the story, though. You may be asking yourself (if you’ve read the other posts), why would I want to relaunch a site that, for all intents and purposes, was running smoothly? 

At the time, we were using a third-party forum provider since forums were cutting-edge. The details as to why we ultimately left are the cliche story you’ve heard countless times - boy meets boy, boy does programming work in garage, boy’s religious repression causes boy to sue everyone. In a nutshell, their service had become unreliable. According to lawyers handling an intellectual property suit, one of the founding partners (lets call him Scotty) left the company in a huff. He may or may not have harbored a deep-seated love for his partner (for illustration purposes - Dirk), not that it may or may not have been the Dirk’s fault, Scotty was deep in the closet. I imagine a scenario like Boogie Nights where Scotty leads Dirk out to his international-orange 280ZX, lurches at him, then asks him to kiss him on the mouth. I am pretty sure none of this actually happened in real life, but it helps me visualize the day-to-day life at their company. The unrequited-love thing may not have happened either, I heard this second hand. 

Read More

Socialism. At its core, the open-source (OSS) vs. proprietary software debate is philosophical – pseudo-political even. The developer-proletariat argues that they should own the code they produce, the anti-capitalist swine. In the mid-seventies, Bill Gates – arguably the godfather of proprietary software – asserted that any reuse of code is “stealing”. The last paragraph in his “Letter to Hobbyists” is telling, “I would appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up [for the code], or has a suggestion or comment.” Some leeway can be given to a twenty-one year old college dropout with a chip on his shoulder, but the general philosophy remains the same.

Given the schism in the web community, it is difficult to get an even-handed evaluation of the pros and cons of each. The arguments typically revolve around cost, security and quality development. 

Not surprisingly, vendors from both arenas will say that they can get your site live cheaper, and in less time than anyone else. Can you imagine a sales guy coming in and saying, “We are going to be expensive, there will be delays, you probably won’t get what you want, and it will take twice as long as you expect.”  

OSS developers point out the obvious – no licensing fee = cheaper system. Proprietary software’s license fee is meant to give you piece of mind. These providers say that an OSS – initial development, support, upgrades, maintenance, and hardware –is inevitably greater than any license fee. Both are true half of the time.

Read More

It was probably my fault. A particular ascot-wearing, retired captain without a boat or any real interest in fishing - rallied his followers to actively stalk me. Not the scary type of cyberstalking, but they did make some sarcastic threats. I figured it was a long boat ride from Miami, and even if they made the journey, I am a pretty big guy, so I could defend myself against two or three old men until a bystander called the appropriate authorities or local news station.

A few posts ago - Online Strategy: People and Objectives - I expounded the process of creating a strategy to relaunch a popular fishing community/publishing site. Our overarching objective was to increase the value of the inventory (essentially improve the click-through-rates). As with any web project, it seems best to take a customer-centric approach then determine how to understand their motives in order to reach your goals - kind of like jiu-jitsu. Based on some number crunching, I grouped the primary people we wanted to address: Regulars, Captains, and Fishermen; then established the appropriate objectives for each relationship: placate, encourage, and attract (respectively). 

Read More

I am pretty sure a small mob of old fisherman want to kill me. “Kill” might be a bit strong. Maim? 

Let me back up.

A few years ago, I put together an online strategy for a relatively large website geared toward fishermen. Based on my research, I found out:

• The site has a ton of traffic for the genre - millions of page views per month. 
• The click-through-rates on the ads are atrocious, so advertisers had no interest in buying the inventory
• A small portion of the visitors (7%) create 90% of the content - things like reports on fishing conditions (good) and locals in day-glo bikinis (not helpful)
• If you strip out the regulars, a good amount of the traffic comes from search, but the bounce rate is also much higher than it should be. 
• The content the users seemed to be looking for is available on the site, but it rarely corresponds to the page to which they were directed by the search engines

A search query of “gulf fishing reports” would dump them on a page that was rich with these keywords. Presumably they were looking for a list of up-to-the-minute reports on conditions and the quality of fishing, but they were instead directed to repurposed magazine articles from 2006. In other words, the problem was not the content, but the SEO and the IA.

Read More