From SOMLIS.
Notes on building things properly — mostly for people who are about to start a project, or wondering whether they should.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
Spreadsheets are one of the most successful pieces of software ever made, and the reason this problem is difficult is that they are genuinely good. They are immediate, they need…
Customer portals: what they replace, and when they pay for themselves
A customer portal is a place where your customers answer their own questions instead of asking your staff. That is the entire idea, and holding onto it prevents most of the ways…
What "your team edits the site, not us" actually requires
Almost every website proposal contains a version of this promise, and it is usually true on the day of handover and false within a year. The reason is that people treat…
What actually makes a website fast
Speed is the one quality of a website that everybody notices and almost nobody specifies. It rarely appears in a brief. It is not on the list of things reviewed at a design…
Redesign or rebuild? How to tell which one your site needs
These two words get used as though they mean roughly the same thing at slightly different prices. They do not. One changes the surface and keeps the machinery. The other replaces…
What a business website should actually do, and how to tell whether yours does
Most conversations about a company website are conversations about how it looks, because appearance is the part everyone can have an opinion on. It is also the part that matters…
What a scope document should contain
A brief is written to get quotes. A scope document is written after a supplier has been chosen, and it does a different job: it records what both sides now believe is being built,…
Why software projects overrun, and the decisions that cause it
Nobody sets out to be late. Projects overrun for reasons that were present at the beginning, invisible for a while, and obvious in hindsight — and the moment the delay becomes…
Fixed price, time and materials, or staged: how software work is priced
Underneath every pricing model is the same question: who pays when the work turns out to be bigger than either side thought? That is worth stating plainly, because pricing…
What drives the cost of custom software
Send the same three paragraph description to four development companies and the quotes will not be close. It is normal for the highest to be four or five times the lowest. The…
Build or buy: when off-the-shelf software is the right answer
The honest default is buy. Somebody has already built accounting software, and payroll, and helpdesk ticketing, and email marketing, and they have spent years finding the edge…
How to write a project brief a developer can actually price
A brief has one job that most people miss. It is not to describe the software. It is to give several different suppliers enough shared information that their quotes can be…
What to work out before you ask anyone to build software
There is a version of this conversation that happens constantly. A company decides it needs software, describes what it wants in a paragraph, receives three quotes that differ by…
A Website, a Portal, or Software? How to Tell Which One You Actually Need
Three different problems get described the same way. Here is how to tell which one you have before you ask anyone to quote it.