Website Budget Examples

In web development there are always many ways to solve any given problem. Usually solutions can range from the very simple to the extremely complex. Often a subtle change in requirements can result in an enormous difference in project scope and price. Given the large amount of functionality already built into the NewfangledCMS and its various applications, many highly customized requirements can be adjusted to fit within existing functionality. Subtle changes can spell the difference between a simple implementation of an existing component and the need to create a new and highly customized application. For this reason, when it comes to areas of custom business logic and custom functionality or applications, it is important to probe a client's needs in order to carefully understand the underlying goals and desires behind those "requirements." Often, when a client requests an extremely complex and un-maintainable piece of functionality, we can suggest something much more appropriate for their needs that will be less expensive, easier to administer, and more maintainable. But, we need to understand the client's reasons for their initial request so that we can educate them on their options.

As mentioned above, there is sometimes only a slight distinction between a simple site element and a complex piece of custom business logic or a custom application. It might be helpful for you to see some examples of similar needs that have resulted in a wide variety of complexity levels.

The FACSS website (www.facss.org) provides a good example of the distinctions between these levels of complexity. FACSS hosts a yearly science conference and initially approached us to build for them a site that would help in the collection of information regarding the roughly 1000 papers and abstracts that make up the yearly event. Initially, FACSS requested that we create a system that would allow them to collect, organize, and publish the paper abstracts online. We advised them that the downside of such a system would be that it would be complex to build and expensive to maintain. It required a whole host of custom tools to be built that would allow administrators to receive papers, sort through them in large groupings, organize them into logical symposia, assign presentation times and locations, and then publish the finished program to the public as website content. The FACSS staff soon discovered that whenever they wanted to change the way that they organized the papers, it required modification to the highly custom website code. Seemingly small modifications required a large amount of work and testing, because of how dependent each piece of the system was on all the other pieces. Eventually FACSS decided to convert the system to a structure that still collects paper information online and, from a user's perspective, functions exactly like the old system. However, FACSS administrators now download all of the paper content and organize it offline, using appropriate tools like Excel to sift through the data. The organized data is then uploaded back into the site in bulk to be made available to the public as an online conference program. This seemingly small change of moving the paper sorting process offline drastically reduced the complexity of the site and custom business logic it contains. The change not only focused the site to harness the strengths of the web while relying on more appropriate tools for conference management, but it also removed the need for a huge custom application, allowing for the site to function more simply with a limited amount of custom business logic.

Usually the differences between sites that rely on large amounts of custom business logic and simple sites are imperceptible to users. For instance, the New England Gas Company site, a large and impressive site, is actually a very simple site from a structural perspective. Although it contains many pages, all of the pages are very simple in their structure and use almost no custom business logic with very few exceptions. By contrast, if you visit the LiteControl website, almost every page includes some custom elements. Most pages will display additional information if you are logged in as a sales rep or customer, so each page needs to be constantly checking a particular visitor's level of access before determining what content to display.

In order to appropriately identify custom business logic, it is important to be sensitive to instances when functionality extends beyond the basic display of content. To get a grasp of what NewfangledCMS applications are readily available check out the applications section of our website. Existing applications can greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for custom business logic or custom applications. For instance, if a client were to approach us to build a tool for them to create ad hoc online surveys from scratch, it might require hundreds of hours of planning and development time. However, since we have already built a powerful online survey manager, the time involved in implementing that component for a particular client would be minimal. Wherever possible, to maximize each client's budget, we steer clients to existing applications and away from custom business logic or custom applications.   next >