Building a website - My experience with Big Electric

Twelve months ago I had simple idea – where can I go to find in-store prices of large appliances in those department stores I like to visit – to finally deploying the website to achieve just that - Big Electric – www.bigelectric.com.au. When every decision is yours to make you learn a lot along the way, so I thought I’d pull together five key things I’ve learnt about developing my own website -

1. Things always take longer than you expect. Plan for it. It’s been a twelve month project from inception to live. In this time I’ve worked with teams from Canada to India, lost a developer mid-project, moved house and changed jobs. Remember to be realistic with timelines, build in plenty of buffer, and stay focused on your original objectives to avoid scope creep.

2. Devil is in the detail. Whether it’s preparing functional specification documents, or briefing overseas teams, ensure you don’t leave anything open to interpretation. Too often I’ve assumed a certain understanding or expectation on how something would function or appear only to find it has been developed differently - not wrong necessarily, but not as expected. To get this fixed costs you time and money. That’s not to say you will always have the answer for everything upfront, which leads me to my next point..

3. Work with specialists. Ensure you work with specialists in their fields, whether it be HTML/CSS, tech or design. Don’t expect that your designer is an expert in CSS, or that your tech team will fill the gaps of those extra pages your designer didn’t cover. Get the right people to do the what they’re good at, in particular with HTML/CSS, which is key to good SEO. It also means these people are more likely to come back with better solutions and offer useful advise along the way.

4. Automation is your trusted sidekick. Running a site day-to-day can include a lot of maintenance and overhead particularly when it’s content heavy. So ensure you build in a good content management system, automated email subscription services, automated ‘recommendation’ engines. Anything you can do to take the strain off those maintenance activities and allow you to focus on more value-adding work will be well worth the upfront work required.

5. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Website development doesn’t end when you hit deploy. Focus on getting the website live within the original scope then iterating. It’s only when the sites live do you start collecting quantitative feedback from your users, where you can start seeing the optimisation opportunities and improvements. Already via Google Analytics I can see the Store Locator is a popular destination, I can also see people reaching product pages direct via Google search results. The next round of updates is already over a page..

I’d love to hear any feedback you have on the site or your own experiences, shoot me an email or leave feedback on this blog.

New paddock, more pixels

It’s been a bit quiet on here lately, but a lot happening, so time for a quick update on Pixel Paddock. I’ve moved on from NDM, to new pastures at DTDigital, part of Badjar Ogilvy. Quick shout out to Kirsten, Jono and the Melbourne NDM crew for making my time there a good one.

I’ve taken up the role of Senior Producer at DTDigital / Ogilvy Interactive. I first worked with David and the team back in the SEEK days, they have their priorities right, understanding the value of user-centred design and are a great bunch of talented people to boot. A good opportunity to pick up some new learnings from a different angle.

Also keeping me busy, is the impending launch of my own project, Big Electric. Been a long time in the works, and only a few weeks away from entering Beta where the fun begins. You learn a lot when you’re accountable for every decision on a site build. Will start sharing some of my thoughts and lessons learnt on the road from idea to execution as soon as the site goes live. Counting down the days.

Keep it simple

Sometimes it pays to keep things simple. Literally.

Watching a great presentation from David Heinemeier Hansson, the genius behind Ruby on Rails and partner in 37signals, on creating a profitable startup, one of the key themes is around realising that an idea can be very simple. You don’t need to shoot to be the next Facebook, but by finding gaps and meeting the needs the thousands of small businesses that require solutions to their everyday tasks, the odds are a whole lot better you can be very successful. Innovation doesn’t always have to be radical, and the value in the business model and execution can turn a simple idea into a very popular and profitable business.

A piece of Tupperware that holds cupcakes? Who would have thought it. Such a simple concept addressing a need to be able to transport cupcakes, making Jennifer Gunn a fortune.

The same applies to the user experience. It’s easy to get caught up in the latest functionality, the latest website, a new Adobe Air application, or Silverlight microsite, but forgetting the technology, it’s got to meet the objectives of it’s users. Myhome.com.au packs a punch in AJAX functionality, but it’s slow and unfamiliar, given the same volume of listings as realestate.com.au, my bet is 99% would still choose the realestate functionaility. The search is simple, fast and again familiar (see SEEK, CarSales). This isn’t to say the technology behind it needs to be simple, it can be quite the opposite if you’re trying to produce the most relevant results possible, but the user doesn’t need to know this.

These vertical leaders need to continue to adapt to meet user demands and expectations, continue to innovate in technology to be simpler, more powerful, but they’re not about to introduce radical change to their core functionality anytime soon. The search & listings structure has been upheld in the various forms on these sites for 5+ years, and we need to remember this is how a majority of people are finding jobs, cars and property every day.



It's a useful reminder for myself in production of an upcoming site Big Electric, focus on meeting user's objectives and keep it simple.