How Jurassic Park is a lesson in Hiring the Right Company for Web Development and Web Programming
This past weekend I watched Jurassic Park and a realization happened. Everything that happened boiled down to the owners of the park accepting the low-ball bid for development and programming of the park’s system. Despite his regards for hiring the best, he chose a different route for what might be an important part of the park. In doing so they were poor in planning the layout of where information was stored, how it was to be accessed and how it was archived. I know what you are thinking how does web development and Jurassic Park relate?
When a company hires someone to create this beautiful, elegant, cutting edge design the client, as the character Jon Hammond states “spare no expense”. They pull out all the stops and discuss with the designer all the functionality they want, or sometimes let the designer make all their preference picks without knowing their client’s product or needs. Never once differing to a web developer as part of the design phase to talk functionality. The Client will spend 1000’s of dollars to have this beautiful piece of work created, not understanding the product they are purchasing. Additionally, sometimes even hire someone, a marketing firm or a freelance Project Manager that can’t even develop the design into a real proper functioning website.
That is where hiring a web development firm or freelancer comes into play. And do you know what happens? Because the client spent so much money on getting the design done just right or close to what they want they bid out the actual functionality work expecting it to cost nearly nothing. Sure you can find a bid for a few hundred dollars, but they’re going to spend that money before the project even gets underway or they are going to cut corners, leaving you with a mess to clean up. As in the movie, the main programmer is begging for more money because his bid for the contract was not enough so he has to resort to a shady deal to get the money. He puts up a firewall and runs a program that takes down the system. This is the same as hiring someone that will hack together poor code or even just copy paste code from another site not understanding what it actually does. It will make your site run poorly, have weird quirks or not work at all. Had they spent money on a Web Programmer and looked at the realistic cost of Web Development, they would have received code that was well written with best practice used. And they wouldn’t have been left having to wipe the system to correct all the problems.
Another thing the movie showcased was that they hired several people with different skill sets to get the park up and running. This sometimes happens when you have multiple web developers working on a website and either you keep hiring a new one each week, or you don’t let them know that multiple people are working together. Examples from the movie would be the fact that there is a circuit reset in the main programming room, but if it fails you have to go across the park to actually get to the main system. The same thing happens with websites. You may have most of your information in one folder and/or file neatly organized. But the functionality files that actually power the scripts that run for the website can end up in 2 separate locations without rhyme or reason. And the functionality may be so similar that it can create problems. It makes you throw your hands in the air wondering what the other person was thinking! It holds true when you start to develop and program a website. If you have all the website styling done in the HTML file, then again in the CSS, and maybe even some in function files it makes it messy for your web browser to read. The reason is that it has to look at all the different conflicting info because it’s reading one rule in one place and then the same rule written in three other places that says the same thing! And that may make for a poor user experience or even slow down how fast your website renders.
The conclusion for all this is that while the park looked stunning, they should have not been quick to cut corners on the actual implementation of the park. Here at JS Web Solutions we take pride in every step of the process. From Design to Finish Product we take steps to talk to our team as well as the client to make sure we are giving you not just a beautiful eye catching site but one that that is easy for you the client to maintain, and runs organized and efficient. So remember while dinosaurs running after you is not likely, making a poor functioning site that has cut corners to make will have you spending more time and money to correct.
