Homebrew or outsource? Nine things you need to know before you build your website.

There comes a time in every website's life when it needs to grow up. You realise that a few pages of brochureware won't cut it any more, and you need a proper, interactive website to project your professional image. Where will your new, improved website come from, and how will you keep it running?

Just like painting the Forth Bridge, a website is never finished! It needs constant tuning and adjustment - adding new content, pruning old content, adding new features as your business changes (see You.com owner's manual). But, every so often, among all this routine maintenance, there will be a major upgrade; a seismic shift that lifts your site - and your business - into a whole new gear.

Done right, these upgrades can really turbo-charge your company, opening up new opportunities and leveraging your existing business. But you've got to get it right - the difference between a small, static website and a large, industrial-strength e-commerce site is as great as the difference between a pushbike and a truck - get it wrong, and you'll crash and burn!

The first, key question you'll need to answer, before beginning an upgrade is: who is going to do it? Are you going to use your own employees, equipment, and expertise, or are you going to use professionals? Are you going to Homebrew, or Outsource?

In order to take that decision, you'll need to consider the following ten questions.

1. What's the objective of the website?

Before a programmer hits a single key, you need to understand your commercial objectives, and how your new website will deliver them.

You wouldn't buy a vehicle, or lease a building, without knowing why you wanted it. Whenever you begin any technical work (even fitting out a shop) you create detailed specifications before you start. The same is true of your website. You need to plan it out before you start. So who will do that planning?

• Could you do it? Do you understand the technology, and what it can deliver, well enough to plan out all that development?
  
• Your programmers? Do they understand business well enough to understand where you're going? (Then, why are they programmers?)
  

If you're planning a building, you'd hire an architect to turn what you want into something that can be built. It's just the same when you're planning a new website; you need a technical architect. What a technical architect does is:

• Understand your commercial objectives, and work with you to make sure you'll get what you're expecting,
  
• select the best mix of technologies to fulfil those objectives, and
  
• plan how the various components will fit together.

2. Who is going to manage the development?

Even with a decent plan, somebody has to make sure the experts are all pulling together. Just as an orchestra needs a conductor, so a team of developers needs a project manager.

Have you ever watched programmers working? Lots of pounding on keyboards, screens full of hieroglyphics, the occasional whoop of joy or curse of frustration. But, more than anything, it's quiet. Programming is solitary work. Programmers don't talk to each other. It's just in the nature of the job that its man against the machine, wills locked in battle. They don't instinctively work as a team. And they often get lost in the details!

To keep them all on-track, to keep them all working on what you value, requires a specialist manager. Frequently the technical architect will project manage - he should: it's his design that they're building, and he'll be best-placed to resolve the snags that inevitably crop up.

But without a project manager, you'll have to brief and manage and monitor your programmers all by yourself. That's worse than herding cats - at least you can see what cats are doing!

3. What skills will be needed to build it?

All programmers are not the same. There's a dizzying array of tools, technologies, and techniques out there, and nobody is expert in them all. When you hear programmers talking among themselves, it sounds like alphabet soup!

Your mission (should you decide to accept it) is to figure out who to hire to build your website. Assuming you've got a good design from the technical architect, you'll need to know which developers have the right mix of skills, not only to build your site, but to keep managing it into the future. Who will be worth their salary over the coming years? For how long will the best contractors stick around?

Of course, you don't have to accept that mission at all! It's true that no individual is expert in everything, but there are development companies who - pretty much - are. It's their problem, not yours, to find the people, and keep them up-to-scratch and up-to-date. They've already done the hard work of building a team and developing the skills - and they've now got a body of expertise that would cost you a small fortune to put together.

And you don't even have to pay them a regular salary!

4. What equipment do I need to run it?

Websites live in computers; if your website is on 24/7 then so must your computer. It's got to stay on through maintenance upgrades, power outages, software crashes, hard-disc corruption, network failures, hacker attacks, and the cleaner tripping over the power cable.

So, you'll need, besides your computer; high-speed leased lines (broadband won't do!) uninterruptable power supplies and generators, air conditioning, firewalls, redundant disk arrays, automated backups, secure cabinets, fall-over routers and a duplicate of all the above to fall-over to. An industrial strength website isn't cheap!

Unless, of course, you get somebody else to handle all that for you. If you put your website inside somebody else's computer, inside somebody else's data centre, they provide all the safety and security you would ever need. Instead of buying loads of expensive capital, you pay a monthly rent. You no longer need to worry whether your website is working, or safe - they guarantee it!

5. How do I manage my people, and how do I know I can trust them?

I.T. is a notoriously fast-moving field, so if you hire your own developers and administrators, they will need constant retraining. But that causes problems for you:

• What if you pay for all their training, and then they quit for a better paid job? (Then again, what if you don't train them, and they stay?)
• How can you tell whether the training they're asking for is to make you look good on your website, or to make them look good on their CV?
• And, after you've provided the training, they'll need to practice and develop their skills. Whose website do you think they'll be doing that on?
  

If you outsource your web development to a specialist company, you won't have any of these problems. Interestingly, neither will they:

• Here at The Webgineers, we develop well-trained, highly-experienced people. Training is part of the package we offer! But training is not enough - we keep our trainees under close supervision - more like apprentices than students.
  
• The developers want current skills and stimulating work, and an outsourcer can provide that in bucketloads.

Outsourcing is better for you, and better for the programmers.

6. Who is going to maintain it?

It takes a particular sort of person to plan your website. It takes another sort of person to build it. But it takes another person again to keep it tuned-up and on-form. That's maintenance.

A good technical architect will make sure that every website has Administrator Control Panels built into it - special pages which your content editors use to update the content week-by-week, even day-by-day. But, where does new content come from? Who takes the photographs, draws the illustrations, and writes the words?

Lots of content is available for free on the web (you may even be reading this article through a syndication service). A good editor will be able to find that material and adapt it for your site. But much of it will need to be specially prepared. Frequently, good editors aren't outstanding writers or photographers - and outstanding is what you have to be to stay in the game. Sooner or later, you will need to commission original content.

Bear in mind, when you approach content originators such as writers and photographers, that creating for the web is quite different from creating for other media. Screens are harder to read than paper, and peoples' attention spans are much shorter. You can't accurately control colour, and you have only minimal control over layout (see, Designing for accessibility).

Remember: you're looking for great web writers, not great novelists!

7. How good does my security need to be?

Generally speaking, as soon as you appear on the Internet, you're a target for all kinds of spammers, hackers, and other ne'er-do-wells. Some of them are hacking for pure fun (and will do no more than embarrass you), some are vandals who simply enjoy causing damage, and then there are other, more sinister characters who are in the game professionally (yes, there really are professional hackers!)

There are all kinds of things that they're after - free email relaying, your customers' financial records (see here, for example), or your own login details.

So, yes: your security needs to be good. It needs to be very good. And to make it good enough, you need to understand:

• what the hackers are after,
• why they want it, and
• how they go about getting it.

The whole issue of security is one of the most rapidly changing parts of the Internet, and it really takes an expert to stay on top of it all. The extent to which you're not up-to-date is precisely the extent to which you're vulnerable.

The best security, of course, is designed-in. If you construct your site without weak points, you'll never have to strengthen it afterwards!

8. How can I be certain I'm complying with the law?

The trouble with the Internet is that it's very good at telling you the facts, but sometimes it's not very good at telling you what you need to know. For example, if you ask Google "What are the laws about running websites?", you'll get drowned in pages and pages of interesting cases, but no actual strategy.

Here in the UK, there are laws that control all websites, and you need to make sure your website sticks to them. Just for starters there are

• The laws about libel and defamation,
• Laws about Copyright and other controlled rights,
• The Data Protection Act,
• The Disability Discrimination Act,

and, if you're using your site to sell products or services, you'll need to comply with

• The Distance Selling Regulations
• The EU e-commerce regulations
• The Sale of Goods Act
• The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and
  
• The Consumer Protection Act,

and that's without thinking about any special laws that might apply to your particular industry (such as Financial Services, Estate Agency, medical or pharmaceutical supplies, or whatever).

To be fair, most of the laws are common-sense and reasonable, and not particularly onerous to stick to - so long as you know what they are.

9. What business am I in, anyway?

What do you do for a living? Do you manufacture something? Do you sell stuff? Do you provide a service? Whatever it is, chances are (if you're read this far) that you're not in the business of building and running websites. That means every minute you're working on your website, you're not doing the job that really makes you money. For you, building a website isn't part of running your business, it's a distraction from running your business.

It's worse than a distraction, because not only would you be stepping out of the the thing you know how to do, you'd also be stepping into competition with people who really do make websites for a living - the people who your competitors have engaged.

Building a high-quality, high-strength website is a specialist job. You're going to bet your business on the result, so it needs to be right. As you've just seen, it takes a team of skilled people to build an industrial-strength website: technical architect, project manager, programmers, graphic designers, and writers. Just like your other specialist suppliers (your legal work, your accountancy, your printing, and your one-off manufacture, for example) it's just common sense that you'd want to entrust the job to professionals.

About the Author

Samantha Unwin is Business Development Manager at The Webgineers, a web development company based in Scotland, UK. She can be contacted on +44 (0)1241 830679, or at http://www.webgineers.co.uk.