By Kyle McCabe | December 21, 2010

Ok where's the Easy button?

A client said in a recent meeting about his service (paraphrasing here):

“A lot of our customers want things very simple, and I always have to tell them the simpler you want it to be for you, the harder and more complicated it is for us to set it up.”

I heard this and thought to myself, wow – he could be talking about web development. He wasn’t, but I am.

The “Easy Website” Button

We also have many clients who come in and say they just want things to be simple and easy. This is understandable, as I imagine few people really enjoy complication.

So what does an “easy website” mean to our clients? Usually it has to do with the user interface and how difficult or easy it is to make changes to web content like events, blogs or photos. But often the easier this is, the harder it was to make it so. In other words the road to “easy” can be packed with complications.

You need drag-and-drop capabilities? We understand – that makes it way easy for you, or even your visitors. But to get that done we’re talking about quite a few hours of programming, or at least tossing a few bones at a third-party dev for existing software, which still needs to be integrated. Basically it’s easy for you, difficult and time-consuming for us. Which means it’s also expensive for you.

The trick is to find a balance between what you can spend and how easy you really need things to be. Can you live without drag-and-drop?

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Photo courtesy of James Cridland

By Allan Emerson | February 25, 2009

To content manage or not to content manage. That is the question. Or that is essentially what’s asked every time a client wants to know how much editing ability they will have with their shiny new website. Some need a little, some need a lot and some may think they need it when in fact they don’t. The key factor in all instances is having an accurate depiction of how much editing will actually take place. So, how much control does a typical site come with?

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