It’s funny, it’s so easy these days to become enamored and enthusiastic about a “web project” that you tend to quickly underestimate its technical plausibility.
For this I blame you, web 2.0.
Seriously, here’s the thing, I think most of us are experiencing a better web today, one that’s regularly[ishly] tickling our minds and imaginations and showing us that we can and should extend our own understanding and expectations for what the web can do for our marketing and communications programs.
New platforms, new protocols, new web services, new mashups, new plugins, and the like are reminding us everyday that there are some kick ass things we can do with the web that even just a few months ago might not have otherwise been possible. And that’s exciting stuff.
Just allowing yourself to imagine a bit is arguably a healthy thing, but here’s the buzzkill, this imagining of yours and mine has to be tempered and grounded with an understanding of the technical limitations and real-world cost restraints that come with web development work — particularly some of the higher-level new media projects. And that just begs the question:
How do bring really cool web projects to life?
For most folks, the easy (and sometimes only) answer is to rely on in-house expertise to get the job done, which inevitably comes with its own set of issues and challenges. For example, does the corporate web team have the time to take on your project, and if they do, how confident are you that they will do it really well? Oh, and how quickly can they get it done? All are important factors to consider.
The alternative is to bring in some outside help, which again, comes with its own issues and challenges, not least of which is, say, the headache of choosing between a consulting shop with web development capabilities, or a web shop with consulting capabilities. Oh, and the cost of it all. It’s all very messy.
Ultimately, there’s a very visible gap that I’m poking at here, one that’s annoyingly dividing ideas from implementations, concepts from experiences, thinkers from makers, etc., you get the gist.
We need to close this gap.
I have some ideas that I’ll be blogging more about here in the weeks to come, also some related Voce news on our approach to this problem. More to come….
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