Web and Mobile App Development

Explorers of social myths, conquerors of lifestyles, and radical innovators require special tools and intelligent interactions with their business systems. These functional systems are "Apps" and while that might be obvious, most people don't realize that every webpage is an App.

Understanding how these pages differ in a multitude of subtle ways is not really the average person's job (nor is it for the average business owner) yet I put the question- if one doesn't realize the difference between a $10 webpage and a $1500 webpage, how does one decide on an appropriate budget?

That question is only indicative of the real issue with contracting web development.

3 steps...

There are 3 steps to launching the typical website of merit. Design, Build and Develop. These are obvious- Planning, Construction, and Productive or Functional Upgrading. Development includes graphic treatments for branding or general appeal.

These are also steps in sequence. This is obvious, yet why is it everyone who ever contracted for a website seeks a designer for the purposes of styling a new website? Graphic design, which is what Design means to most people, is an aspect of Development. That's step 3. Who contacts a Planner for step 1? The problem goes deeper than language.

The first sign of trouble

Every business has limits. Whether it's time or budget, or both!

A collection of web developers sit around and talk about why it is that business owners waste so much time and money.

The reasons range from mundane to fantastically strange, and yet a common thread emerges:

It is not a lack of business savvy or personal smarts, but a considerable gap in technical education that prevents most business owners from leveraging the budgets they do have in order to produce appreciable results. Results which may actually stimulate their business and yield ROI are far less common than frustrated groans I hear about the web and technology in general. This is the huge problem that has come along with Web 2.0 mainstream media, with a plugin for everything. Everyone hears how easy it is, and do-it-yourself appeals to tight budgets, and every marketer on the face of the earth has a system to sell and most of it is just a system to --- profit the marketer. We know who's on and who's full of it. But do you?

Here are the immediate signs of trouble:

• You are asking "How much will it cost to create a website?"
• You are asking "How much will it cost to create one of your websites?"
• "Just give me a ballpark of what that would cost..."
• Pointing to a site and saying "I want one like this!"
• Failing to state a specific budget to your designer or developer.
• Collecting information about a build to parcel out components to specialists.

"I can't ask how much a website costs?"

How much does it cost to create a webpage like Google's? That's easy. It costs $425. The catch is that there is conservatively 3 Billion dollars of development in Google's architecture, and yet it focuses on the most simple of ____________.

Remember, every webpage is an Application.

Google's website was a single page application that now does sprawl out into different business branches, yet it is still cohesively led by their contemporary main page. Google constantly develops, or upgrades its front page graphic, and this is updated every day to commemorate some interesting historical or significant contemporary person, event, or idea.

More significant than the way it looks, there is over $12B (twelve billion dollars) of service structure behind Google. The real power of Google is in the architecture and the results produced by their webpage- their Application.

Following the above example should yield something like this:

"I need a website that will create a sense of my company's unique niche to every visitor at a glance; it should grow my contact list by offering a valuable incentive in exchange for interested people's email addresses and names; it should promote my new product A as a gateway sell to the entire product line A-Z."

Statement #3 cheats a little because it encompasses one primary goal and one feature- promoting one product, and leading to a family of products- yet it is noteworthy the business owner chose this specifically instead of "I need the site to sell my products" which is too general.

The keys in these statements are qualifying how one's website accomplishes it's duties (product A is a gateway sell to A-Z...), and it establishes the real goals which are needed. If not certain about what the goals really should be given airtime, it is time to check into an expert technology planner, a Consultant.

"Why is that important to me?"

Remember this question. The best techs are stereotypically the worst communicators. We work at refining our "people sense" all the time and still get it wrong. It is good business to speak in terms of Features and Benefits. When the tech fails to interest you with features you care about, yet they sound insistent about some jargon that sounds like it contains some mysterious benefit, ask that question and see what results.

Uncommon Sense

The web makes uncommon sense. Things that sound easy as pie are ridiculously difficult. Things that sound utterly impossible yield a smile and a live demonstration in seconds from any two-bit web hack.

In the above enclosure, one key exercise is given to assist with development getting onto the right track.

Contracting a developer to draft technically specific plans for a project is called creating Specs.

Spec Sheets assist in assigning real value and budgets to the most significant project aspects. This is where uncommon sense begins to meet common sense, because the difference between assumption and action-specific principles are set into a common format that each person can read and address. Good business decisions follow clear specs.

In real terms the most significant problem we deal with in our industry is the lack of education among business owners and managers in the tech arena. This is a point of frustration for everyone. There have been extremely innovative ideas in marketing we developed over 10 years ago, and yet very few businesses understand how to qualify these products. In the last 8 years, it has finally become commonplace knowledge that a website is needed. Yet most websites today do not yield any ROI. They are privately funded, and continue to lose money.

This is important because the entire conventional wisdom states that Knowledge is power. Intelligence is applied knowledge, and it is far more powerful. Intelligence is a living process which employs creativity to determine which sets of knowledge to apply in a given situation. Business uses creativity all the time, it just may not recognize it. Bridging the gap between these distantly related terms requires someone gifted in communication. If that is not going to happen via a liaison, or a tech consultant, let it happen with developers who can help assign practical terms that can be understood in English, or the language of your choice.

Knowledge vs. Intelligence

Even among tech developers and industry insiders, there is a vast hunger for "perfect knowledge" and it just doesn't exist. Knowledge which is properly applied is effective, and each situation encountered by each business presents a fairly unique opportunity to apply good principles. Yet it requires true expertise and a range of skills beyond any one specialty to bring successful applications, marketing, or even just plain 'ol websites into focus.

If that is too much language, here's this: "A good tech needs extremely specific boundaries to render any estimate or ballpark cost. Unless there is a spec sheet, it will require labor and some inside information to produce ANY estimate or ANY "ballpark" figure. Nothing of any real value can be delivered otherwise. It may often require hours of work and planning to be able to render any reliable information related to an estimate. This is why developers are engaged and paid to use their technical expertise. They create logical plans and assign functional requirements for resources. The planning phase is the most important phase of any project, yet 95% of business owners ask the Estimate question first.

It is wasting time and money to do so.

Specialization is Destroying your Business

The industrial revolution of 3 hundred years ago ushered in the concept of specialization. In today's terms there are any number of categories of IT industry specialists, and the fact that they exists speaks loudly of a culture that has created an entire industry without really understanding the principles of its most fundamental component. My statement isn't popular, but it's true: the funding of the entire technological world has occurred via transactions that were not intended to promote creativity, intelligence, and cooperation or even collaboration. They were created from positions of tremendous ignorance- not stupidity- but understandable ignorance about the possibility presented in this last 15 years of history. Specialization is destroying Industry as we know it today. Some would say that's good, but the reality is that our economy is a direct result of globalization and the destructive effects of specialization.

The quest for standards of quality have given rise to many professions which do not inter-relate. It requires middle-professionals to string their work together into some cohesive format, and this yields mediocre results the majority of the time.

Just the same as Knowledge is fairly static until applied properly, it is true that one bit of skill- however great that one skill is- is fairly useless until integrated into a larger system. Isn't this why specialization occurred to begin with? It served a growing population of people and provided simpler tasks for everyone so that everyone could share in productivity.

Still, there are times the view and scope of how that works must be adjusted. I have yet to see anyone other than a software developer understand how one set of graphics integrates into one set of page layouts, and includes functions to produces one template for Web and Mobile consumption to serve each of the top 10 browsers to within 1 pixel spec. You may not even know what we just said, but it requires at least 4 specialists to produce these items. When something goes wrong with the integration of these systems, whose disclaimer should be read aloud first? Let's say a specialist can create a Web Template, but a developer can implement that Template to achieve results.

Let's go back to the big question- "Why is that important to me?"

Because nobody really knows how to create a Template that delivers market penetration. Nobody can do that, but we assure you that a website can be developed to meet your needs

Integrated Specialists Headline Success

The most prominent Web companies (or tech firms) today are agile groups of 4-5 executive techs with balanced input from among Marketing, Software, Finance, "Connections" and Hardware. In a way, this is what your web application should be like. It should consist of 4-5 strong components that all work together seamlessly to produce outstanding growth and deliver valuable services or content.

When it comes to delivering your content and the value your services or products provide, the company you choose to work with should have far reaching vision. The company should be anchored deeply in the technical world, and the company should understand that each of you serve the end-user-client first and foremost.

The company you will partner with to produce your Application- your website, your iPhone, iPad, or Android platform App, or even Blackberry or Windows 7 Mobile App- it is this company which may well define or limit your capabilities.

 

Our products are implemented in every scale of business from the energy industry to the sole producer of arts and crafts. Our systems are extremely affordable by qualitative comparison, and provide superb usability for administrative needs as well as your client's ease of use. Take the opportunity to stake your claim in the New Conscious Market emerging on the web.

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