The Savvy CIO

There are two major methods of developing software: waterfall and agile. If you’re considering a development project, you should consider how your software should be made.

Waterfall development goes through distinct stages, with requirements gathering in the first stage. In the waterfall method, a group of decision makers think, imagine, script and whiteboard how the system might be used. These working sessions create a set of requirements for the application. After the requirements are set, the waterfall method flows down to future stages of development, testing and deployment.

In contrast, agile development breaks a project down into small stages. Each stage tackles a small area of the application, gathering requirements, building, testing and then putting the growing application into the hands of users. This process allows requirements to emerge over time, as users and developers learn together exactly what the application needs to accomplish.

Waterfall development assumes the requirements of a system can be fully predicted and codified before any development begins. Agile development assumes requirements only fully emerge during the process.

Waterfall development aims at a stationary target. Agile development aims at a moving one.

So which method is best?

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Bigger, better, faster.

That’s been the trend in all things Internet over the last ten years. Computers and connections are faster. Monitors have been growing bigger and bigger. Websites and web applications have been stretching into all of that new screen size and bandwidth to deliver big, fast, media-rich, interactive sites.

Now that’s starting to change.

Bigger, better and faster aren’t going away. But a rapidly increasing number of people using the Internet are trading some of that in for other values: mobile and accessible.

Tiny phone screens and modest tablet screens are going to represent a sizeable part of web traffic in the future. I have not always been a believer that the mighty PC and laptop would actually be supplanted for “serious” Internet use. But I believe now. It’s still early, but the trending is clear. read more »

The primary ways of accessing the Internet are changing. Now that large, wide-screen, flat panel, high resolution monitors are affordable and easily available, they’re being abandoned for tiny screens on mobile phones. Exactly why so many of us would choose to access a website on a screen the size of a playing card (while attempting to walk down a sidewalk at the same time, no less) can be bewildering, but there is no denying the “mobile revolution” has gained critical mass.

The stronger your online presence, the more people there are looking at your website or newsletter or blog on a mobile device. Do you have any idea how it looks?

If not, go ahead and try it out. It’s usually not very pretty.

The bad news is that all of the attention, effort and resources you’ve poured into your website, newsletter, blog, e-commerce site, etc. amounts to almost nothing on a mobile device. Load times are so long and screen sizes are so strange that only the most determined mobile browser will be able to find the information they’re looking for.

The solution? Start providing mobile alternatives. read more »

Check out this great story about how open source crisis-mapping software has saved lives in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere. Two people wrote the program in a few days during the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence. The result?

The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.

This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.

Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.

The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump. read more »

Darren Rowse over a ProBlogger has some good thoughts about website and blog content for click-happy browsers. It’s a short and funny read.

Darren experimented with a video chat site called ChatRoulette. The site randomly paired him with another person, and either person can click away to a new partner whenever they want. Darren couldn’t even get others to acknowledge him before donning a clown wig.

Applying his experience to the people browsing his blog (and your website), he offers this summary of visitor behavior:

• They don’t stay till long - they’re always clicking
• They are always looking for the next best thing
• They only pause if they see something that is interesting, intriguing or completely relevant to them
• They are ruthless
• They are impulsive
• They will judge what they see within a split second of arriving on a site
• They rely upon instinct and first impressions

He has some take home lessons for interacting with this type of person on a blog or site, but it’s important to note that not every site or blog (especially business ones) should plan their web strategy around this type of visitor. read more »

Deez provides high performing auto racing parts and specialized racing fuels. Recently, the company was looking to take their online marketing and e-commerce presence to a higher performing level.

Highland delivered an e-commerce site to help Deez stand out in a competitive automotive market. The site layout allows customers to browse multiple channels whether by brand, category, or through digital copies of Deez’s catalogs. Catalogs are still big in the auto parts world, so Deez included them as a digital link between catalog browsers and online purchases.

The home page highlights current specials and featured brands along with new and best-selling products. Our extensive experience with auto parts e-commerce sites coupled with marketing research done by Winsby, Inc. informed the layout, matching customer expectations and targeting buying trends.

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Bad website design comes in several forms.

There’s bad design. In it’s extreme form (now more rarely seen in the wild), this is garish fonts and graphics, scrolling banners, and a home page that is about 15 screens long. I’m gone from these sites in under 5 seconds.

There’s bad layout, where you can’t find what you want, get lost quickly, and can’t see how to get back. If the site looks nice, I can put up with this for 4 to 5 clicks, and then I’m gone.

These mistakes are easy to see and, with the right skills, easy to fix. But there is another type of bad design that is more difficult to recognize and much more difficult to fix.

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We recently programmed a client’s business-to-business e-commerce site to display competitor pricing alongside their own pricing.

Sound crazy?

We don’t think showing your competitor’s pricing is smart for everyone. But the idea behind it is embracing the truth that you can’t hide information from shoppers. Most visitors already know the lowest prices for the items they’re buying, or can double-check in under 10 seconds. There’s no hiding anymore.

Last week I found myself at an enormous, local mall hunting for a pair of shoes. Like most shoppers, I had a set of assumptions in my mind about what was important to me in my purchasing decision. In my case my criteria were, in order:

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Google has released a handy gadget for web site design last week. It’s called Browser Size, and it shows what most people see when they look at your web site. The results may surprise you.

Web sites are made by techie people (like us), and techie people spend a lot of time in front of big monitors with high resolutions. Sometimes, the result is a web site that looks great for people with big monitors but looks different for the majority of your web site visitors. Look at Google’s example: read more »

We develop, customize, build, integrate and host web applications and web sites, and we do it almost exclusively on open source software.

Why open source?

There are several reasons, but here’s a big one:

Open source saves you money.

That’s you, the client. Open source saves you money. read more »