Darryl King’s blog ireckon

This seems to be my ‘theme de mois’ at present. Perhaps it has come from a realisation that it is very easy in web development to include a few extras and people miss the actual value of them.

A challenge while managing and building web applications, and sites, is to ensure everything is in the specification upfront so there are no extra charges, or included freebies (gold plating). So far, in the last 12 years of this, I have found that to be near impossible to be 100% correct, if the project is large and complex.

I am starting to use the above phrase more and more in presentations, and during developments, to make sure that everyone realises, time still equals money even on the web. Also many people don’t realise the physical cost of hosting and bandwidth in Australia (don’t get me start on that one or Sol). There is a feeling that because open source exists, and you can access freeware and many code snippets, that everything on the web can be done for nothing.

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A lot of money is being spent again on web engineering for commercial success. During the lead up to when the dot com bubble burst every good idea got capital and the ‘web stars’ worked to engineer their destiny using a good idea and capital.

Many of them are doing something else or were up until the cycle started again.

Over the last 12 months or so the drive to engineer a site’s own commercial success has been fueled again. While companies, like ireckon, that provide development services can profit from this time (and I have no issue with profit), I still reflect on the logic behind it.

Everyone wants to be the next Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Craigs List et alia. And while these sites are the oft-quoted ones there are plenty of other sites that have profited from the internet and converted great ideas to money. This leads to my main question:

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