Article originally from rooJSolutions blog This week saw the release of the latest site developed by Roo J Solutions, www.prettybooked.com a Hong Kong based beauty booking service. While the site has gone through the usual last minute bug-fixes before going live, it all came together in the end.
Developing a feature rich web site.
While we where busy finishing off this site, We have had a few other projects and discussions going on, and what has been interesting lately has been the realization that far too many companies and startups are having real trouble getting web sites developed properly.
Often they are cutting costs, and contracting under-qualified or unsuitable individuals for the process. Resulting in disaster hitting quite early and the project never being complete as their 'developers' have no idea how to solve the technical issues involved.
But the saddest and worst scenario's I've seen, has been the frequent employing of design companies or 'interactive media' companies as the lead contractors on web based development. This can be the most expensive recipe for disaster. In one case the cost of the development was bloated to over 10 times the realistic cost of the project, and what was delivered was just a prettified open source project. When the client started asking for features that the original open source project provided, they where quoted quite unreasonable amounts. The sad fact is that the relationship between the supplier and customer was damaged beyond repair. Without a deep understanding of how software projects are developed, these companies failed to manage their customer's expectations.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
In another case a design company was asked to provide a custom web site, which from a design perspective looked quite nice, however as part of our installation on the server, we got to see the kind of code that was being delivered. If this software was a car, the wheels would fall of when driving out the garage, It was the worst and most dangerous code I've seen in nearly 10 years of development.
Read on for more about prettybooked, and how to get projects done properly...
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