Tommy Olsson writes a nice “F.A.Q.” on HTML markup. File this one under must read if your a web developer, or if you’ll ever write any HTML markup. I’ve generally known how to be standards compliant, but this article has shown me the “why” in a few areas I didn’t know before.
We’re working with some developers on a project and I wanted to share this funny question we received from them today.
“We are going to use AJAX instead of radio buttons – is that ok?”
I just had a meeting with two bright guys who have spent the last three months building an ecommerce system from scratch. Actually, they haven’t been the ones doing the coding, it has been a group of 4 students from Devry (a technical trade school in AZ). Talk about a school project.
During our meeting, they said that they had a cumulative effort of over 400 hours into building an ecommerce system, and the owners still have to make changes to products directly in the SQL database.
I can’t tell you how often I hear this. I’ve even done it myself! Years ago, I landed a big project to build an ecommerce site for a local company and by the time we had gotten some semblance of a site working, we were all de-motivated. The reality is that it would take several man-years to even come close to matching the features that a mature ecommerce application would have.
So what happened? We ended up scrapping all of our work (about 250 to 300 hours, all told) and installing an ecommerce system we had been keeping our eye on.
The end result was that in about a week, I had the web site done (and very little sleep, but it was done!). The client was more than satisfied, we had exceeded their objectives.
Back to the people I met with today — During our meeting I could see them addressing an internal struggle of whether they really wanted to throw out everything they had made. The facts are stunning: potentially invest hundreds of hours and continue as planned… or throw it out and start with a solid base.
In the end, when you add up the dollars, there are very few situations where it makes sense to build your own ecommerce engine. There’s just too much to think about. Security, payment gateways, discount codes, adding and removing products, order management, databases, affiliate systems, product categories, and more.
I have similar feelings about application development in general, but I’ll hold those for another day.
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In the world of web project management as it relates to building complex web applications, do you think that the development should follow design, or can both be done concurrently?
I’m involved with an exciting project with a fast approaching deadline. Because of this deadline the development team (database, JSP, and Flash) had to get involved early in the design phase making it difficult to update design templates down the road.
I was wondering what your thoughts are on this matter? I’ve been involved with such a large number of projects and had this same situation crop up, that I’m convinced that in most cases, design should be 100% complete before developers are called in.
By taking this approach, the developers can focus on development and not have to worry about new features or design changes.
Your thoughts?
I was talking with a new client today and he has an ecommerce web site that someone built for him in Cold Fusion. He commented to me that Cold Fusion is on its way out, and that it isn’t the preferred choice of developers any more.
I have to agree. I’ve known several developers who swore by Cold Fusion — exclaiming the virtues of fast development and easy to write code. Sounds a bit familiar. Almost like Ruby on Rails.
We had someone come by our office last week and explain Agile Software Development to us. I have had it explained to me a few times in the past but it’s never struck home so much as it did the other day. There are a lot of great concepts and I’m trying to figure out how they apply to what we are doing, and want to do in the future.
Have any of you used Agile Software Development methodologies and what have been your results? If you don’t know what it is, go ahead and read about it on the Wikipedia.
Here’s the whiteboard explanation without the acompanying 2 hour talk.
At the top of the whiteboard you can see a typical process for building a web site: Analysis, Design, Development, Testing.
The process for ASD is to create a mini-release every week. This allows developers to focus on simple tasks that they have that very week, and not become burdened by the big picture. It also keeps the customer involved at every stage and since they have the information they need at every step of the way, puts them in charge of the process (at a small level, anyways).
Definately a great concept and it has a lot of future in it, the trick is knowing how to implement it into your company.
We are looking to bring on a web developer for a project (this would be a 1099 gig) and have everything ready for a developer to begin. We will also consider a small team. Up until today we had planned to have a developer work on this project and then the plans fell through.
Everything is completely specified and all of the screens are developed. We just need to tie them all together. Preferably a PHP developer, but we’ll consider others in the open source arena.
Please, no placement agencies or contracting agencies, principals only.
Stylehive is using a css style that loads an image placeholder. That way the page doesn’t look blank while the images are loading. Great idea.
img.potential_error_image {
background-image: url('../../images/broken-image.png');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: 10px 10px;
background-color: white;
}
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