Changing the Technology and the Magic of Responsive Web Development. Does It Really Exist?
If you read this, it means that you have a business, and as basically every business in the world now, a website. Imagine a situation: at a certain stage of work, it turns out that the technology is outdated or incompatible with other components. Maybe you actually are in this kind of situation. Does it make any sense to start from scratch and — more importantly — spend even more money? Why should we change technologies anyways?
Technology Is a Being
What is supported and promoted as an everyday solution now, can be outdated not even a few years but months from today. The main reason to change technology is the very fact that it may be not supported and developed anymore, and logically, it will be more difficult and even more expensive to find a specialist committing to work with it.
Now, analyzing the factor of the costs of the market, it is widely known that people are willing to pay for technology. There are not many free solutions to certain kinds of modules and as your developer probably already informed you, there are fine dozens of plugins for WordPress, but we will find just a few for Joomla. Not even to mention the fact that the more outdated the technology is, the less compatible it is with other technologies. The logic here is pretty simple — the more outdated the technology, the higher the cost.
Where Are You At?
Let’s differentiate two main stages of creating a website module and two borders that can multiply our costs at the moment of a change in the realization process:
- Planning and the start of coding.
- Actual coding and the launch of the website.
Realizing at which stage you are is the key factor. The necessity of a change in the first case means that we have to delete what has already been created and spend money on creating something more up-to-date, starting from scratch. We don’t deal here with something already launched and living, but let’s say, with a skeleton that has to be replaced.
Second case scenario is much more complicated as after the official launch of the website and the decision to change it, we don’t only loose the code itself, but also all of the history of the website interaction from after the launch. Starting from scratch in this case means that we have to create and launch a completely new product, loosing the data of the one that had already been launched and ‘living’, an organism interacting with external users.
The lesson to be learned here is simple — the further we are in the realization process, the more difficult it is to start from the very beginning, but sometimes it is necessary. How do we know when?
Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple
It is difficult to see any of these situations as a blessing in disguise, but answering the right questions with a proper mindset will help you make the right decision and swiftly move on to action.
Whichever stage you are at, first of all you need to understand why such a situation happened. Instead of looking for the guilty ones straight away, listen carefully to the arguments of every side and deduct why they decided to use this particular technology. Processing and realizing the answers of all of the people involved may not be easy, but then the responsibility will be apparent.
Ask yourself whether the technology used as the proper solution was to influence the whole project positively. Maybe the outdated technology influenced the realization of different component and as a result, other outdated yet cooperative technologies were used to fit with the primary one? Or the opposite — an outdated primary technology influenced the choice of even more outdated technologies on the level of other components?
If the realization of the project up to this moment helped you actually understand much better what you expect and how you can use this knowledge, it is already one step further. Also, probably thanks to this rotten apple you may know how much time it takes to complete a project to a certain stage and even create a minimum viable product prospect, which will gather valuable information about the product you can build upon.
Assessing the whole, try to understand how many hours it exactly took to drag the project to this stage and make sure whether or not it is possible to use at least part of what has already been created — this will help you see the full picture and also calculate the out-of-pocket situation.
Look Before You Leap
Assess your business development model. If you are up to launch a dynamic website, like a blog, social media platform or a shopping platform, changing the technology after the launch itself will be like replacing the whole system. Along with the code you will loose externalities like transaction histories, user accounts, comments. If we assume that the website will change and develop with time and no anticipated finish, it is logical and reasonable to update the technology as soon as possible and treat it as an investment.
However, if your more ‘still’ business development model assumes the complete exchange of the technology and all the modules every three or four years due to downright functionality updates, changing the technology of a product ready to launch would be motivated strictly by desire, not by necessity, like in the example above.
Money Talks — Keep It Simple and Do the Math
He who pays the piper calls the tune, but nobody wants to spend more than it is actually necessary. Cost minimization is probably the decisive factor for you when you have to change the whole technology of your website. If you just want to test the new business model — launch the website using the technology available now. Do the same if you are simply out of funds and with no prospect to find them. But if you consider changing it, it is essential to have the ‘investment mindset’, not the ‘saving one’. If your development strategy is dynamic and you are able to spend the savings on replacing the website technology that will serve you longer than the one you are supposed to have now — do it. If you don’t, the costs will meaningfully multiply in the future, and as a result, you will spend much more.
Let me present you an example of a situation that made the customer bleed money for a little while, but eventually turned out right for him (all is well that ends well). One guy had his website content written for Application Service Provider with non-dynamic, standard protocol. It took around 200 hours to write, each priced $55, which makes around $11K. Next, it took another 20 hours to add the products to the content itself for as much as $1100. Developing the module until this moment already got to $12.100, straight from his pocket.
Now imagine that the guy has found out that the maintenance of WordPress is much cheaper than the standard and stiff ASP technology. For example, adding new elements to WordPress would take around 10 hours and $550 instead of creating them from scratch especially for the ASP system, with impressive result of whole lot 40 hours and $2200. It is a huge difference also looking at the prospects: the numbers for ASP are hypothetical as we also need to understand that finding an expert to work on this system could be even more pricey.
At this point of website development process, he could still use the markup and data configurator. Nevertheless, moving the not–so-useless pieces to WordPress was more or less 100 hours of writing and $5500 along with adding the same products to the content for the same 20 hours and $1100.
While doing the counting, creating the content for ASP eventually cost the guy additional $6k (50% of his budget), which is a lot of money. At the same time, if he hadn’t done it, he would have gradually spent even more and more.
Good Old Technology
It is important to assess the situation you found yourself in not only with a calculating and logical approach, but also with a dose of opportunity mindset and hands-on attitude. Noticing that every issue is determining the discovery of the most tailored solution is priceless — especially if we understand that neither unnecessary leaping into new tech trends nor going in circles in the technological dead end is favorable for our business models — and our pockets.
