My Web Guys are crap.

Posted by Mark

One statement that we hear a lot in our industry is "my web guys aren't very good".

Quite a bold statement to hear on a regular basis, especially when a website's quality is mainly a subjective matter.

What is generally inferred by this sentence is that the systems produced aren't achieving the targets that the business owner requires. Whether the targets are site clicks, page impressions, customer registrations or e-commerce credit card transactions, there is definitely a lack of co-ordination between the performance of the software developed and website owners' ambitions - this lack of communication often leads people to believe their website isn't performing up to standards.

Quite often there will be easily-implementable solutions that will move the actual output of systems closer to the desired goals, but as no clear targets have been defined for the various processes, detecting possible improvements becomes impossible. Developing a flexible system consisting of clearly defined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) means that not only will an application be more expandable, it will also help define what changes need to be made to improve it and therefore create a more organically-grown system.

Quantifying the success of a website will then be a possibility and make any such instances of "my web guys aren't very good" much more authoritative.