Peter Bell — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:24:34 GMT

You’re right about locking down the spec. We have spent a huge amount of time optimizing our process and now rather than wasting time developing a bid, for clients that meet certain criteria, we simply specify and generate their website for them on spec. If it is close enough to what they want, they just pay for the work together with any revisions and look and feel (we generate a fully functional site, but don’t do custom design work on spec as it is too subjective – but then we’re also happy to work with third party designers for skinning the site and use best practices CSS, so they can make substantial changes to the structure of the site without making much in the way of changes to the mark up).

Of course, it took us years to lock down the process, but it’s basically about agreeing business objectives,required tasks and for each task (use case) agreeing all of the actions and screens (including exception cases such as when a form entry was invalid). Of course, we can’t generate everything in a few hours, but we find in under a day we can usually generate rich web apps with pretty compelling functionality.

Why waste time looking at references and RFP’s when you can just spec and build the site! Of course, if you need serious consulting to determine how to achieve your goals online, we offer that as a service (or recommend you speak to someone else and then come back when you know what you want to build), but it is surprising how many business problems can be solved pretty quickly with the right generator!

Found+READ: Comments by Peter Bell