What You Should Expect from your Web Services Provider

Throughout the process of design, we find a theme of education. Images are constructed to convey information related to a cause or a brand and we judge their quality or value based on the effectiveness of these factors. So, too, do we look toward the creation of new technologies not only to perform the desired task but also to deliver an inherent message. As designers, we must teach ourselves to understand a client’s needs and critical business information, to own it wholly so that we may be effective instruments in the dissemination of it.

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.” — John Updike

To be a provider of custom software development or web development means that we accept the responsibility that we are educators of both our clients and the recipient to our client’s information. To educate, in this sense, means more than simply standing before a classroom of students to disseminate written material in order to promote individual learning. It is incumbent upon us to create tools to allow for a more rapid exchange of information, to be both educator and the facilitator to education.

Most commonly, this aspect of our work is displayed through the introduction of new technologies. However, this fact overshadows a much more valuable derivative of the process: the act of reducing and abstracting the requirements of our clients to serve their core needs directly with lower cost over time.

“To aim at excellence, our reputation, and friends, and all must be ventured; to aim at the average we run no risk and provide little service.” — Oliver Goldsmith

We hear terms such as “Return on Investment” frequently in our business and we think we’ve reached a critical mass by developing a core set of functionality in CoalEngine™, our signature content management system. We are able to leverage this proven platform and minimize client cost particularly in those instances where custom development is required.

Each time we interface with a third party system, we retain the benefit of that interaction for any client that may need a similar solution. We have found that, at the end of the long process of custom integration, no single client bears the burden of the cost entirely since solutions are replicated and reproduced within the CoalEngine platform.

“There are only two options regarding commitment. You’re either in or out. There’s no such thing as a life in-between.” — Pat Riley

Recently, we had an opportunity to draft a proposal based on a statement of work from another vendor. The client in question had paid for a design document to be drafted based on their requirements. The process took over a year to complete, and once we received the request for a proposal we had a response completed within two weeks. This sort of timeline is normal, even for the more broadly scoped requirements documents, because we’ve spent a tremendous amount of time “covering the bases” for the core functionality of any Web site.

While reviewing the competition’s statement of work, even though it was based on an open source platform, it was apparent that the vendor was planning on writing an inordinate amount of functionality for the site from scratch. This code would then be retrofitted onto the existing open source content management system. Once this process was complete, an additional $30,000 was planned for testing and quality assurance alone.

The system that was planned didn’t support consistent plain-text URLs, had no integrated analytics package and e-commerce support was to be provided using a single-step shopping cart “plug-in.” Each element in the list of required “components” that was intended for this client was far from impressive. The cost, however, was substantial given that the customer was a non-profit organization.

“Excellence is in the details.” — Perry Paxton

The proposal we provided, which included CoalEngine with CoalBiz, CoalCalendar, CoalSpeak and CoalGallery along with a binary license for the engine came to almost a third of the cost of the previous vendor. The total time for customizations of the system equaled about half that of what the competitor had listed for testing and quality assurance, alone.

When I think about what you should expect from your Web services, or application service provider; it’s this:

There is no “I” in “TEAMWORK”.