Reduce Web Development Cost By Sharing Web Experience With No External Spending

Issue How to reduce development costs for individual brand Web sites while ensuring corporate Web strategy? Response There are various possibilities to reduce the annual recurring Web spending. However, most of them such as typically Web site consolidation or Web infrastructure homogenization result in large projects with significant investment and time to production. For companies that are not yet ready for such investments or use different Web technologies or companies that want to reduce their Web spending with no technology investment should centralize and share their Web development. Centralization means not to take away site ownership or responsibility of local Web teams but providing frameworks, guidelines and most important to share corporate wide Web site developments and experience. Such a centralized approach can only succeed, if senior management supports it and if the corporate wide dispersed site and business owners and development teams play together. Large global organizations with more than thousands Web sites spend annually multiple millions for their Web projects. For example a large European company spends more then $30 M for their Web sites for site maintenance and evolution (an average of $30 K per site per year). In most cases, this spending relates to hosting and licenses fees and development costs. As not all corporate wide Web sites have the same strategic importance from a corporate perspective, there is a huge potential to leverage Web site project experiences from strategic important Web sites into less strategic Web sites. Practically it means that other Web teams could simply reuse Web site elements that have been developed by other Web teams. Though, this idea looks very simple, in practice it turns out to be very difficult. The main reasons are the lack of

• Corporate wide guidelines or frameworks that standardize the development independent of the underlying technologies. Typically, Web site design standards can be part of this corporate wide guidelines or frameworks.

• Support by senior management to support central development processes.

For example the above mentioned European company has developed their specific Web site design standards and has reduced their annually Web site spending from $30 M below $20 M. This 30 percent reduction was also driven by centralizing and sharing effectively Web developments across all corporate sites, while staying in a multi-technology environment. Global companies that are looking for reducing their ongoing Web site costs, without changing immediately their technology or infrastructure should perform the following tasks:

• Senior management mandates and supports central corporate Web team to homogenize the Web development experiences. This is absolutely crucial, if senior management doesn't support the centralization of development experience, local or central Web team can nevertheless launch the centralization initiative without this support. There are proven approaches to get the buy-in and support of senior management at a later stage, such as performing Web site consistency checks, perform pilot project, etc. (see Practical Planning Framework: Best Practices - Defining Web Site Design Standards) Nicolas Brki is the founder of

  Suggest a Correction

  Found an error or have a suggestion? Let us know and we'll review it.

  Your Name *

  Your Email *

  Correction Details *

  Submit Correction