Incremental Growth Dukes it Out with Scalability
I’m a big fan of building in small incremental steps – to make sure something’s a good idea before investing a ton of time and money into it. In practice, if you’re waiting for a giant pool of money to come in so that you can buy the perfect piece of software, it’s likely to never happen. It usually makes sense to start with something small and affordable to see if it’s going to work before investing.
On the other hand, I’m also a big fan of scalability – of making software choices that will grow with you, so you don’t have to remake them next year. And I’m realizing that those two principles are really not very compatible with each other. In a lot of cases, you’re forced into a trade-off which is hard to weigh.
For instance, take the Idealware website. Our website is currently (I’m cringing as I write this) static. We're not using a database backed CMS – all of our pages were built and are updated by hand, and with the help of Contribute (there’s a little php going on, but only for easy updates of global elements like the nav). That’s clearly not the best infrastructure for our current site. It’s in fact an enormous pain when it comes to links to articles seminars – they all have to be added and deleted from multiple pages by hand. And it precludes structures which would make it easier to find articles – something where articles could be affiliated with multiple categories or tags to allow easier browsing. We have failed to drink our own kool-aid.
And we’re now in a place that’s hard to get out of – we need to migrate all the static content into a CMS. We don’t really have the time or money to do that right now, but the longer we wait, the worse the migration will be.
It’s not a good place to be, but in trying to think through where the decision making went awry, I’m not sure what I would do differently.
When we initially put up our (five page brochure-ware) website, more than two years ago now, a static infrastructure made a huge amount of sense. I was funding everything out of my own pocket, and was unsure whether anything about Idealware would fly or not. At that point, a minimal investment was critical, and open source CMSs were not so stable– using one meant a considerable investment in either money or learning curve, and there was notable risk that whatever package you chose would wither and die. These days, it might make a little more sense to invest in a Joomla or Drupal website, but unless you have the skills to do it yourself or ready volunteer help, I’m not sure I would recommend it even now for a brochure-ware site for a startup nonprofit.
The structure continued to make sense at each step. Putting the Online Donation Report up, starting the article series – all fit quite well into the current site. It’s only now, when the volume of articles and resources is outgrowing what our navigation structure can reasonably support, that the gap between what we should have and what we actually have is so painfully apparent. But I guess that having so much stuff that it's hard to organize is a good problem to have.
So maybe at the end it’s inevitable. Two years is a long time in web years – maybe it’s outside of the timeframe that one can plan for as a startup, and it’s to be expected that we would need a new website now. And maybe if we redesign now, we should go ahead and plan for another big-band redesign in another three to four years.
It also vividly brings home for me why investing in effective infrastructure is so hard. It demands making decisions in favor of fuzzy long term strategy goals which are in conflict with short term mission related objectives. There’s no question that a redesign done right will cost us several thousand dollars at least in time and money, even assuming that friends of Idealware might offer substantial help at way-below-market rates.
Is it worth the money for a redesign? It’s so hard to say.
As annoying as it is, certainly we’re not spending several thousand dollars, even over a couple of years, in simple site update inefficiencies. What’s the dollar value of increased ease of use? Better cross-promotion between articles and webinars? I don’t think anyone has enough information to effectively put a number on those. On the other hand, what’s the long term mission or strategic value of other things we could do with that several thousand dollars? That’s a lot of money for us, which could fund a lot of things. Should Idealware even invest in ways to distribute our content ourselves, or should we be a content creator that primarily relies on other channels to distribute it? Sigh.
Anyone out there have the mystical answer to how to reconcile the desire for incremental growth with the need for scalability? Or how to balance long term strategic technology needs against short term mission objectives?
On the other hand, I’m also a big fan of scalability – of making software choices that will grow with you, so you don’t have to remake them next year. And I’m realizing that those two principles are really not very compatible with each other. In a lot of cases, you’re forced into a trade-off which is hard to weigh.
For instance, take the Idealware website. Our website is currently (I’m cringing as I write this) static. We're not using a database backed CMS – all of our pages were built and are updated by hand, and with the help of Contribute (there’s a little php going on, but only for easy updates of global elements like the nav). That’s clearly not the best infrastructure for our current site. It’s in fact an enormous pain when it comes to links to articles seminars – they all have to be added and deleted from multiple pages by hand. And it precludes structures which would make it easier to find articles – something where articles could be affiliated with multiple categories or tags to allow easier browsing. We have failed to drink our own kool-aid.
And we’re now in a place that’s hard to get out of – we need to migrate all the static content into a CMS. We don’t really have the time or money to do that right now, but the longer we wait, the worse the migration will be.
It’s not a good place to be, but in trying to think through where the decision making went awry, I’m not sure what I would do differently.
When we initially put up our (five page brochure-ware) website, more than two years ago now, a static infrastructure made a huge amount of sense. I was funding everything out of my own pocket, and was unsure whether anything about Idealware would fly or not. At that point, a minimal investment was critical, and open source CMSs were not so stable– using one meant a considerable investment in either money or learning curve, and there was notable risk that whatever package you chose would wither and die. These days, it might make a little more sense to invest in a Joomla or Drupal website, but unless you have the skills to do it yourself or ready volunteer help, I’m not sure I would recommend it even now for a brochure-ware site for a startup nonprofit.
The structure continued to make sense at each step. Putting the Online Donation Report up, starting the article series – all fit quite well into the current site. It’s only now, when the volume of articles and resources is outgrowing what our navigation structure can reasonably support, that the gap between what we should have and what we actually have is so painfully apparent. But I guess that having so much stuff that it's hard to organize is a good problem to have.
So maybe at the end it’s inevitable. Two years is a long time in web years – maybe it’s outside of the timeframe that one can plan for as a startup, and it’s to be expected that we would need a new website now. And maybe if we redesign now, we should go ahead and plan for another big-band redesign in another three to four years.
It also vividly brings home for me why investing in effective infrastructure is so hard. It demands making decisions in favor of fuzzy long term strategy goals which are in conflict with short term mission related objectives. There’s no question that a redesign done right will cost us several thousand dollars at least in time and money, even assuming that friends of Idealware might offer substantial help at way-below-market rates.
Is it worth the money for a redesign? It’s so hard to say.
As annoying as it is, certainly we’re not spending several thousand dollars, even over a couple of years, in simple site update inefficiencies. What’s the dollar value of increased ease of use? Better cross-promotion between articles and webinars? I don’t think anyone has enough information to effectively put a number on those. On the other hand, what’s the long term mission or strategic value of other things we could do with that several thousand dollars? That’s a lot of money for us, which could fund a lot of things. Should Idealware even invest in ways to distribute our content ourselves, or should we be a content creator that primarily relies on other channels to distribute it? Sigh.
Anyone out there have the mystical answer to how to reconcile the desire for incremental growth with the need for scalability? Or how to balance long term strategic technology needs against short term mission objectives?
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