Web site construction woes

I've heard lots of woes from people trying to work with their Web site consultants this week. You know the type: they promise that your site is "just about finished" and the pages "just need some tweaking" and yet nothing gets done. I have had to suffer through whiney rants about delays, bad programming decisions, tools that malfunction, missing logins and content wrecks.

Have we reached the point where building a Web site is a lot like building a new freeway? It takes far too many people, time, and dollars, upsets the people who have to live near it, and in the end is obsolete by the time the first people try to use it.

I remember the good ole days of the Web, say 12 years ago, when one person (like me) could build a site in an afternoon, without any really specialized tools or knowledge beyond knowing a few tags and reading a Laura Lemay book.

I am coming to the conclusion that we need to return to those simple days where one person can still build their site, without the heavy lifting of a Web Site Designer and a Web Programming Consultant and an Internet Search Specialist and a Web Marketing Person. (Capital letters deliberately intended to reflect the title's self-importance.)

At one site, a simple database was taking months to webify. I ended up talking to the site's graphic designer, who was the only one who had any project management skills and could reign in the wayward development staff. Said staff has trouble configuring something that my high school networking students could do in their sleep. Someone else was complaining to me that their copy of Dreamweaver had started behaving badly, and all I could do was recommend a clean uninstall of every Adobe product on her disk, short of buying a new computer. These are just a couple of the stories I could tell you this week alone.

So in the 15 or so years of the Web we have better tools, but they still suck. Better sites, but they are still annoying with pop-ups and dead-end links and overblown graphic frippery. Better site statistics, but still no insights into who comes where and why they leave our sites. Better traffic, but still a lot of mythology about how the search engines point our way. And speaking of search, why is it that we still can't do better there on deploying good internal site search algorithms?

There is a simple answer: rebel, resist, and reclaim the Web as your own personal place. Avoid the consultantization of the Web. Fire your designers and programmers.

Start afresh with a blogging tool like Wordpress or Blogger and build your site around that. Or pick up a couple of widgets and components, or use dabbleDB or Pageflakes or stuff from Google or Yahoo. You don’t need a passel of programmers to work this Web.

Since moving over to Wordpress and posting these simultaneously to the blog and my email listserv, I have noticed that I don't do any site maintenance over on good ole' strom.com anymore. Why bother? The old archive of prehistoric articles is still there, and maybe even a few of the links still get people to the original places. A few pages are in the top ten category on Google, not through any forethought or planning of my own, and I am grateful for that traffic.

As Thoreau said, simplify. Part of being all Web 2.0 is never having to hear the sorry tales of your programmers that are behind schedule, over budget, and full of excuses why the dog ate their APIs. Forget about them, and build a simple, quick site that can deliver some value the same day you start the project.

Waning attention spans

I find that my attention span is getting shorter and shorter, and I have coined a description for this condition: hair-trigger multitasker. I start a task, and if it is taking too long to complete, I move on to something else. It means that I find it difficult to spend long periods of time working on particular projects. And it also offers a convenient excuse why it took me until today to write this column: I just couldn't find the time to complete it earlier in the week.

I am in good company: Even Rupert Murdock says he rarely finishes the longer WSJ stories.

The hair-trigger part of this means we have become more impatient. What about slow-to-load Web sites? Outta here. Long-winded emails? Hit the delete key. Some of us have bought a second screen for our PCs just so we can have lots of windows open to keep us amused.

I find that the way I interact with my computer is also changing: I used to be able to read long Web pages and articles online. No longer. I watch shorter online videos too: five minutes is almost the outer edge for me. I guess this is one reason why Sony (and I would assume others will join them) are now repackaging five-minute episodes of Charlie's Angels and TJ Hooker. While some of you might say that there never was more than five minutes' worth of content in these episodes, it goes to show that online, life is short. Cut to the chase (literally for both programs mentioned), get in, get out.

I find that my own video viewing habits are going bi-modal: the short Web videos that you can find on You Tube et al. The longer feature-length films I still watch in my living room. Not much in-between.

I haven't analyzed how my writing style has changed over the years (now, that would be a project for some undergrad to take on) but I would be willing to bet that my sentences and paragraphs are getting shorter, too.

Back when I toiled in the IT fields at Transamerica Insurance, we had to do Flesch-Kincaid Readability tests on our documents, to make sure they are readable. There is a tool to do this analysis online of course (not sure of its accuracy).

Does this spell the end of deep content diving? I don't think so. But it does show that as we design new Web sites, we need to make more of our content more digestible. More componentized. Summaries up at the top of the page. Sentences shorter.

It is harder to write these nuggets too. It was Blaise Pascal who said: "I made this letter very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter." (Hat tip to Larry Hertzog for today's column idea.)

Skybus and online flight booking

We have entered a new era in airline booking with the creation of YACA (yet another cheap airline): Skybus, operating out of all places, Columbus Ohio. I mean no disrespect for the town, where parts of both sides of my family once lived before they all retired to Florida or Vegas. And I wish this new entry well, even though they don't fly anywhere near where I live.

There are several things that are interesting about Skybus. First, their Web site is modeled after EasyJet and Jet Blue and has a nice booking engine where you can quickly figure out what flights are available at what prices. I call this Strom's first law of airline booking: a customer wants the utmost in transparency and ease of use when it comes to finding the cheapest fare. The sites and airlines that do this well will succeed. It isn't enough to know that I can find the cheapest seat, but that I can have some reasonable assurance that the seat I buy today will continue to be a good deal next week too.

I like the calendar view that Skybus and EasyJet use, but I also like how Southwest shows you the prices of flights the day before and after your initial query. If you have some flexibility in your trip, it is very easy to use.

Other travel booking sites have gotten into doing some interesting things with searching the airline reservation system, and the one that I have come back to more than once is Kayak.com. It takes some learning to figure out how to eliminate and focus on the flights that you want to take, and I am not sure of its entire universe of fares, but for trips where you have to connect and could use a variety of hub cities, it has a lot of promise.

My second point about Skybus is you can't call them – operators are definitely NOT standing by to take your reservation, they are 100% Web-only. If you have a problem, send them an email. I think this is great until you have a problem and need someone to resolve it. And time will tell if they are responsive via emails.

We all have our horror stories about airline travel, especially after this winter, and I will share one of mine here with flying United. One of the things I learned about United is that their call center is really sub-par. Clearly, they have outsourced this offshore, and the level of expertise is definitely lower than what I have seen on other airlines. About a month ago, I ended up sitting on the tarmac here in St. Louis, knowing that I will miss my connecting flight in Chicago. So I get on the phone and see if I can at least expect that a seat for the next flight out of Chicago. The call center people – and I tried multiple times – all were spectacularly unhelpful, even going so far as to say that the connecting flight was sold out. Of course, when I got to O'Hare and got on the next flight it was nearly empty, and I had no problem finding a seat.

But I will never fly United again, if I have a choice. Now trying to project that experience with Skybus, they still need something for passengers who get delayed. Perhaps at the Columbus hub they will have plenty of terminals that you can access – I haven't been there so can't say – but what if you have problems at their remote airports where the Internet connectivity isn't that good, and there is only a single flight per day?

My third point is that Skybus is also being transparent about charging for things beyond the space your body fills on their planes. Want early boarding so you can get the seat of your choice (they don't assign seats, ala Southwest)? Want to check a bag? Change your ticket? They are upfront about these charges, although they could do a better job of enumerating them in a single place on their site. They are also upfront about those oversize passengers that should book two seats, but usually don't. Having sat next to quite a few of these people who "compromise any portion of the seat next to them" (a wonderful locution from their site), I applaud this wholeheartedly. One nit: golf clubs aren't charged extra but bikes are.

The Mac Web Ghetto

I don't like to toot my own horn (much) but back in 1998, I wrote about how Microsoft was making it so easy to develop Web applications that soon most corporate development shops would think of the Web as something that originated in Redmond. Well, I was reminded of that realization this week when surfing around on my Mac, and finding out that I can't get to certain parts of the Internet. I now live in a Mac ghetto as far as the Web is concerned, and like most ghettos, it isn't easy getting out of it – unless you happen to have a Windows PC nearby.

I couldn't connect to the Web site of my doctor's office to make any appointment, because their site only wants patients to enter on IE and Windows. I am testing some security appliances for Information Security magazine, and some of their configuration pages also expect to see IE and Windows. I thought I would upgrade to QuickBooks online rather than buy some new software -- but guess what? It only runs on IE and Windows! And the OfficeLive service from Microsoft – which by the way is very cool and is an absolutely free Web hosting solution – only runs on IE and Windows. The list goes on and on.

Fortunately, I run both MacOS and Windows here, so it is more of an annoyance than a showstopper. But still, the message is clear: if you use anything other than Windows, you are not worthy. Go the store and buy a real OS.

The Microsoft Web has been happening for some time. As I wrote several years ago, developers are building Web-based applications using tools and servers from Microsoft. They run on IIS with ASP, and use Visual Studio and of course assume that Internet Explorer is the intended browser so they write these apps accordingly. And if they dabble in Java, they use the Windows version of Java that doesn't quite work on non-Windows platforms.

Microsoft's tools certainly can deliver the richest, coolest Web stuff in the shortest time. Of course! That is their not-so-secret plan. They get what makes developers tick and then they supply the Microsoft-flavored crack that keeps their programming mojo pumped. It is a wonderful thing, no? Sun, bless them, still can't figure this out. IBM with all of its Eclipse and open-this-and-that, can't figure this out.

Well, there are some bumps in the road, especially with the latest version of IE, version 7. Some of the IE faithful are finding out that things can be painful under the Microsoft Web. IE7 breaks a lot of stuff, and not everyone has tested – or adjusted -- their apps for the new browser. Eventually, we will all work out the bugs, I am sure, because we have no choice.

Remember the days when the Web was "browser-agnostic" – meaning that you could run anybody's browser to view any Web page? That's so over, so quaint. Now we can't even build a Web that is "IE agnostic" to run on any two IE versions, let alone versions of IE back to say, v5, which seems like ancient history but is still pretty much in active use on many desktops today. That is one of the problems of the Microsoft Web: it flies in the face of what the Internet used to be all about: writing to internationally accepted standards that actually meant something.

Oh, come off it, Strom. (You might be saying.) So what? Look at what happened to Netscape, who took the standards high road? They got AOLized, and then sank after a cameo appearance at the Microsoft monopoly trial. Who needs standards when Uncle Bill can take care of all of us? Aren't we better off with just running Windows?

Not really. The Web deserves better than to become yet another Microsoft business unit. There is a reason why I still use my Mac as my main business computer, so I can save the countless hours that I would have spent fixing spyware attacks and redoing my OS when it gets messed up with somebody's idea of a good joke. But it means that I have to live in my Mac ghetto, and that's a shame. Because it means that now we are locked into the Microsoft Web.