1. The graphic designer brings the client to the web developer. They talk. They agree on the project then the web developer sends the specs to the web programmer. It was in August.
2. Early September comes when the programmer delivers the project according to the specs: a Joomla plus Virtuemart e-store web site, capable of handling up to 99,000 (a marketing digit, yes) products on sale. The developer and the graphic designer present the newly built site to the client.
3. The client is not a man but a team, naturally. And the most vocal member of the team, incidentally the youngest, begins with a vivid critique of mutating the pixels all over the screen. I'd say "mutating" instead of "moving" because the passion sensed was that intense. Ensue about two months spent on redesigning and overloading the initially balanced design. In other words, changing the skin and charging the skin with more whizzbangs all over the corners, the sides, tops and bottoms.
4. Late October. The client team holds a meeting together with the web developer and the graphic designer. At that meeting the more ponderate voice of the team's senior leader is heard. We're finding out that the "site is slow". The answer has been given time and time again: every new widget requested is adding seconds to the page download time. It is slow because it is overloaded. No one from the client's team seem to figure that out. And then comes the hammer: the client needs yet another little addon, like in the top of the page a countdown button that will empty the cart in 10 minutes if the buyer has not checked out before. Just a lil' line up there... thinks the client. Well, the programmer had to spend another couple of weeks with recoding Virtuemart core code and Joomla session handling to meet that lil' detail addon. No one seems to figure what's that such a big issue adding there a button to the site... No one but the web developer, the programmer and even the graphic designer.
5. Project finished, loads slow, even slower because of the extra coding. Plus the client is informed that such a degree of code alteration will make future upgrades problematic. But that's not the primary concern of the moment: now the client wants us to dump the entire code base, that is Joomla plus Virtuemart, and replace it with exactly what their competition are using for their e-store engine. That being a Russian built swift shopping cart. Sure do, we say and haste to please the client. But there will be much less glitz to the page with this more so-to-say spartan design of the skin. And this for the good reason of cutting down seconds of the page load time, making the site speed up. We notice some miscommunication inside the client's team. The ueber-glitz glossy/flashy trend resisting the clean and fast new proposal. If they'd knew this in August? Actually, they did heard of it. Because the programmer and the developer were telling them, repeatedly, that the most undesired consequence of over-designing will bring a slow site up. But hearing is not all in the communication process. One should process the data into intelligible info, aka. one should "listen".
6. Yes, the new --completely new, non-Joomla, no Virtuemart, up from scratch-- code base had to go the altering for that countdown to empty the unordered shop cart in minutes. Done before Christmas and even uploaded some over 10,000 items in it. Page download times between 4 and 9 seconds. But not enough and maybe too late for this project to have a future. The client team members were already signaling that one of them was already looking to hire someone else to do the job.
7. We get paid for the time but not for the stress. End of project.
It took about one extra year to see this project gone live. We knew the developer who took over from us and it wasn't with him that it went live. We don't know if there were more "stations" in between. What we know is that this client invested a considerable amount of money plus almost two years of work, back and forth, in order to deliver a web project that could run in less than a quarter.
What ingredients were missing to make this project a nightmare for everyone involved in it? Some of them:
1. Underestimating of function as opposed to design. Belief that a simple line on the screen will take a minute to be added in there while trusting that sliding some fancy images on the screen is a great feat.
2. Failure to present a first A to Z closed list of requirements. Perseverence in adding a new requirement at a random rate, or unsuspectingly changing an old requirement.
3. Failure to understand that less is more.
Note: Joomlapeople.com did not existed at that time and I wasn't working for Webverksted.no either at that time.
