Darryl King’s blog ireckon

The current online buzz words we all hear are Web 2.0. There is a lot of mixed messaging about 2.0 and what does it really mean. I was reading a good article about the hype / push to 2.0 everything out around the market (Social Media and Web 2.0 - Jason Burby).

The new drive behind 2.0 has a bit of a familiar ring to the year 2000 hype surrounding the web changing the world (shortly before meltdown occurred), although don’t get me wrong I love some of the great new ways the web technology can now be used.

What I like about this article is it mirrors sentiments I often express to our customers about any part of their web development (or any development on or off line), which is create / find the reason first then look at the development.

Whether it be for a Web 2.0 tool set or application, looking at interacting with social networking sites, or even something as simple as a sign up to a newsletter box on a web site, first have a reason and then plan how to deliver on it.

Every successful business I know is busy or trying to be busy. Thus creating another process or additional workload without ROI is not something they want to jump on. As a developing company it would be easy to just say yes to customers - “Yes we can build that, Yes why don’t you have that etc…”. Unfortunately that doesn’t serve anyones interests.

The decision maker needs to have questions asked of them:

• “How will you update this?”
• “What resources (ie. staff) do you have to manage it?”
• “Can you handle X % extra inquiry / response / activity?”

and a raft of other questions.

The idea being to not do, what was apparently common problems, as per the report referred to in Jason’s article:
A tool centric approach, Failure to plan for ongoing engagement, Doing it for the sake of doing it and failure to measure.

Any type of business activity has a cost involved, whether it be time or money. Far too often in web development there is little planning for future cost of a development, only what is required to start today.

While that is the nature of humans in their enthusiasm to build and create something new - it is important that web development has its own reality check along the way.

• What is your goal for your site?
• Is it meeting that goal? Why not?
• What steps could be taken to head towards that goal?
• Do you need to review that goal?
• What information would you need to help make that decision?
• Can your development team answer these questions? Have you even asked them?

I love the web as a medium and web technology but I believe its implementation is still in its infancy. We see the benefits of Web 2.0 are that businesses are now starting to apply better business practices to their web decisions and that is great for a full service company like our own.

It means we get asked to do the things we can do and to do them properly.

For reference:

Wiki on Web 2.0