by
Bruce Morris
Corporate Webmaster
A certain amount of chaos in a Web development project not only makes
certain that the prop-head and pony-tail types needed for the project feel at
home, but is important to keep the team from feeling stifled. However, the
suits also need to be kept happy - remember this is a joint effort between
Marketing, IT, creative and other departments. Even if your project does
not include the usual large corporation trappings, limiting chaos to the
good kind is vital. Set some simple rules and keep your eye on the ball.
January 10, 1999
Establishing and managing a large commercial Web site is very similar to
running a large daily newspaper. There is a constant flow of both vital
information coming into the development team office and pages of this
massaged and formatted information going out. The deadlines are not only
daily, as at a newspaper office, but can be hourly or even more
unreasonable. Seeming chaos in such newsroom environments is normal and
perhaps even desirable. Actual chaos, on the other hand, is an insidious
disease that quickly robs any development effort of efficiency and
timeliness. Actual chaos demoralises the troops and costs money.
One of the biggest enemies of such a project is momentum. Projects like
this gain both positive and negative momentum and take on a life of their
own. Without clear plans and procedures being adopted early in the process,
the press of daily 'must do' activities makes it almost impossible to
improve workflow once bad workflow habits are endemic. Management by crisis
becomes the norm rather than the exception. Making decisions early on to
embrace open standards as much as possible will make both small and large
ongoing site development projects easier to implement and manage.
To make a site successful, work flow processes and clear goals are essential.
Goals
Clear goals and timelines should be established incorporating a
brainstormed 'features list'. If making money is the goal then the site
features that lead to that goal should be prioritised and should include
building visitor loyalty, community building, adding incremental revenue
streams by cleverly utilising visitor demographics, and making the site not
only fast but easy for the team to manage. Based on goals, needs analysis
and benefits analysis documents should be prepared in order to prioritise
and schedule development projects.
'featuritis' is endemic in any software or Web development program and can
lead to work flow catastrophes. Without resource-based decisions about
feature priorities, essential features can be lost during the development
process due to inordinate amounts of time spent on non-essential features.
That VRML piece that everyone on the team thinks would be cool may take so
much energy and attention that other, more essential projects get
neglected. Most Web developers would rather work on some cool VRML doodad
than spend time coding tedious product description pages.
Architecture and Site Development Standards
To keep the site not only
easy to manage but fast, performance standards must be put in place as
early as possible. The actual plan of the file directory structure should
be discussed and implemented as soon as possible. As the site grows, poorly
planned directory structures quickly become unwieldy and can lead to
duplication of effort and slow page response times. File naming conventions
put in place early can ease confusion later as the UNIX geeks swear at the
Mac heads because file names with spaces are causing problems.
One of the obvious ways to increase visitor satisfaction and increase
loyalty is to make sure pages are served as quickly and efficiently as
possible. There are several things needed to make sure this happens.
Graphics standards should be set. Obviously we all like our sites to be
whizzy and cool. Everyone knows about the performance trade-off, but there
are a couple of things to keep in mind that can keep your performance as
fast as possible and still have a "kewl" site. Use Debabilizer to squish
your graphics files down to their optimum size. Intelligently use a 256
colour graphics palette since most viewers have their computers set to the
standard Windows palette.
Server planning must be done. For most sites a hugely powerful processor is
not going to make your pages serve any faster. Serving static HTML pages is
not processor intensive. When I worked at Gateway 2000 we served over a
million hits per day on a plain old Pentium 166 for over a year. What we
did do to move files out faster was load the system with RAM. I'm a firm
believer in using as much RAM as money can buy. You can't be too thin, too
rich, nor have too much RAM.
Dynamic Generation is the cool buzz word among http server weenies. If you
are serving pages dynamically you can almost certainly increase apparent
page loading times by using multi-processor systems or a Web farm that
shares the load. Microsoft SQL Server sites should dedicate a separate,
powerful machine to run the SQL Server software by itself. It also makes
sense to determine which pages really need to be dynamically generated and
only spend the processing power on those particular pages. Loading every
page on a site dynamically using templates is appealing to the propeller
heads but without fail slows down site performance. Perhaps it is a good
idea to serve dynamically only those pages where that type of flexibility
is essential, and serve all other pages statically. Alternatively it may be
a good idea to dynamically generate the site pages off-line and upload them
automatically every hour or so instead of building them anew for each visitor.
Workflow
To keep your eye on the ball, efficient planning is needed.
Project management software such as Microsoft Project should be used to
help determine priorities based on resource restrictions. Pre-planned work
structures and document control procedures are essential for any large Web
development project to avoid chaos. Each distinct section of work in
progress should have an attached 'job jacket' or 'job sheet' with check
boxes indicating who has reviewed and approved the job in process. Strict
quality control procedures should be established. Copy, graphics and code
style guides should be prepared to ensure consistency and ease workflow. An
industry standard copy guide such as the AP Manual of Style should be
selected and used. One person should be established as being in charge of
work flow and should set job priorities and assign individual projects to
particular developers based on the project needs and the developer skills.
File Management
Policies need to be developed for managing the soon to
be thousands of files both on and off the live server. Ease of server
management, security, style consistency and typographical integrity are
almost impossible to guarantee without a clear procedure for managing Web
site files. Separate server areas should be established and particular
persons appointed to be in charge of the integrity of each area. For
instance, a distinct Development Server should be established that has a
fairly true copy of the live site and all the functionality of the live
server to be used for hands on development of pages by the general
production team. Each team member should have their own directory to hold
their temporary work. Permissioning should be used to protect work in
progress. A 'Truth Server' should be established that is only accessible by
one or two people. This server would have an exact copy of the live site.
Files would be moved into this server only after all appropriate section
managers have approved them. A system of periodic, automatic uploads
(perhaps hourly) to the live server would ease live server management.
Access to the live server should be severely restricted from the very
beginning of a Web site development project.
Comprehensive Marketing Plan
Unless you're running something like the
Playboy site, traffic growth on your Web site is not going to happen all by
itself except in a small way. You can count on some people coming to your
site with almost no effort on the part of the Marketing Team. But we're
talking about large commercial Web sites that are going to make loads of
money and all involved will retire to yachts and other luxury destinations
within a year or two. To make this happen you have to have a carefully
thought out and implemented plan to get millions of eyeballs to your site.
This subject could easily develop into an entire series of articles all
on its own. You can read a wide variety of articles about Web traffic and marketing right
here at the Web Developer's Journal.
A certain amount of chaos in a Web development project not only makes
certain that the prop-head and pony-tail types needed for the project feel at
home, but is important to keep the team from feeling stifled. However, the
suits also need to be kept happy - remember this is a joint effort between
Marketing, IT, creative and other departments. Even if your project does
not include the usual large corporation trappings, limiting chaos to the
good kind is vital. Set some simple rules and keep your eye on the ball.
More ecommerce articles ==>
| 
