I recently was asked to answer a question from an SME for the Microsoft Ultimate Makeover campaign. The question was : "should my company have its website created by my web-savvy nephew, or should we turn to a professional web builder?". So I put together a brief answer talking about how web development is more than just building pages. A lot more. By coincidence, I was already putting together a web development matrix for internal use, trying to capture the different aspects of web development throughout the development cycle. The result is sort of a Sea Battle game board to be populated with knowledge and tools...
This is what it looks like :
A brief explanation:
On the X-axis you find different stages in web development, from architecture to maintenance. The Y-axis lists the different areas of expertise needed. For each combination (an area of expertise at a certain development stage), there might be a need for mainly knowledge (in red) or tools (in green).
The areas of expertise are divided into 2 large groups: topics having to do with internal behind-the-scenes work, and topics that are visible to the end-customer.
The behind-the-scenes topics are:
- bugtracking : how to track and solve bugs efficiently
- collaboration : tools that help collaboration between team members, designers and developers
- versioning : tools to keep track of different versions of files and projects
- documentation : creation of inline and external documentation
- code validity : how to write good code and have it validated (eg W3C XHTML validator, CSS validator)
The outward-facing topics are:
- rendering : how to get your website/email to look good in different browsers/email clients
- usability : knowing how to turn your website in a 'comfort zone' for your visitors
- speed : rocket-boost your website
- scalability : how to design for growth
- security : how to protect your website from attacks
- analytics : how to prepare your website and the tools needed
- SEO : how to optimize your website for search engines (Google's SEO Starter Guide might fit in here)
So what's next? The rather big task of bombing all areas with documents, whitepapers, presentations, tools, services, ...
Remarks, ideas or suggestions? Just post them here as a comment or mail me. The results will of course be posted on this blog.
You can also download the Web Development Matrix as a PDF file: WebDevelopmentMatrix.pdf (26.03 kb)
