Balancing the maintenance of a website against developing new features is always tricky. However it’s a decision site owners should not shy away from – with finite resources and competitive marketplaces, it is one of the key decisions that will determine the success of a site.

Spend too much time keeping what you currently have current, and you’ll loose users and customers to other sites with expanding services.

Build and move on, without revisiting what’s already there, and nothing you build will last for very long.

And we haven’t got on to how much time should be spent optimising what you currently have.

The one common element of running a website seems to be that there’s always more to do. Technology develops at a rapid pace, as do users’ expectations and needs.

With a finite capacity to respond, site owners need to be clear about where they allocate resources to:

  • support current activities,
  • reduce lost opportunities (due to sub-optimal experiences), and
  • respond to as yet unmet opportunities.

Conventional business wisdom suggests that a level of strategic planning should guide this decision-making process. However that becomes increasingly difficult in a rapidly evolving market place, based on shifting technology - 5 years is a long way off and, unless you’re one of the big guys, probably irrelevant.

Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules about how to divide resources between the three activities (or at least none that I’ve come across).

So where do you start? The first thing to do is stop – allow yourself some time to think (even an hour of dedicated thinking time will help). If you haven’t got the time straight away, plan it in for when you will have the time - you’ve probably identified your underlying issue right there – you need to give yourself time to think at a strategic level.

Once you’ve got the time, there are a number of techniques you can use to get you up and running. Group brainstorming and prioritisation or SWOT analysis are a couple of quick techniques to get you thinking about what you need to be doing. Identifying your key objectives can be slightly longer process but usually comes of the back of the earlier two. And don’t forget analytics insights, to see what’s actually happening on your site.

Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 11:23 am | Categories: web teams

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One comment on “Maintenance vs. development”

“Support current activities, reduce lost opportunities (due to sub-optimal experiences), and respond to as yet unmet opportunities.” While it may not always be feasible depending on the size of the team, I wonder if these three items should be separate roles.

Basically you’d have the maintenance person, the optimizer, and the blue sky thinker. Each role would require different skill sets.

Leave a Reply