Web Developers vs. Business People
Web developers are supposed to make websites for businesses, for money. It’s their job. The problem is, web developers and business people very seldom speak the same language. It seems like a trivial problem, but it is often a very difficult barrier.
For example, I met with a potential client the other day. I had some e-store software that I wanted to set up for him. He was very receptive, and was getting pretty excited about what my software can do for his business. He just had one question for me. “Will I own the software? If I pay you for this website, I want to own the software. It has to be mine.”
This stumped me. My software was built on open source frameworks. I was charging him for installation and customization. The software as a result is open source, and definitely not his to own. I started to tell him that the software would not be his, but he would be able to use it. This in turn made my prospective client very angry. He was in no way going to pay for something that he could not own - this was unacceptable to him.
After much careful talk, I deduced that “owning” the software to him meant that he could access it from his computer at home, nothing more. It didn’t mean that he would own the code, or have the rights to it or anything - just that he could use it anytime he wanted.
This kind of misunderstanding almost cost me a deal. The main reason that I am bringing this up is that in addition to being designers and coders, web developers must also know excellent communication skills. Business owners like using Microsoft Excel. You can build as must software as you want, and make it as easy to use as anything, but business owners will always go back to Excel. My e-store software is useless to one of my clients because their business is based completely in spreadsheets. The only way my e-store software can be beneficial to them is if he can import products to the store from an Excel file, download the store’s inventory into an Excel file, and even add/edit/delete items from that file and re-import it. To a web developer, this may seem redundant, especially if one has spent hours and hours building a web interface to perform those exact add/edit/delete actions. However, to a business person whose business is run entirely out of spreadsheets, this is the only solution that makes sense.
That is why this week I am looking into PHP Excel. It should be relatively easy to import and export .xls or comma-delimited files using PHP, based on the contents of a MySQL database. I’ll post my findings here.
For more on Excel Spreadsheets and Business Logic, read this.
Gavin Blair @ May 10, 2008