Where do mediocre sites come from?

Image By: wiseacre .

Who is guilty?

No matter who you are: a freelancer, a web-studio employee, a site customer, or just a bystander, you probably wondered, “Where are there so many bad sites on the Russian Internet?”. Who is to blame for the fact that in RuNet there are many sites with inconvenient navigation, ill-conceived typography, confused texts and sloppy pictures. Studio workers? Freelancers? Customers? Let's dig a little deeper and look at the process of creating sites in various studios.

Small, but remote

Small studios, up to 10 people, are different. Those who rivet sample sites of 5,000 rubles each are not considered, for their very purpose is to make bad sites.

The most interesting are small studios in which enthusiastic friends with burning eyes work. They try from the heart, with all their might: they work in the turbo mode at night and on weekends, lick every pixel, diligently debug every feature, use the latest technologies and even invent new ones.
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It takes a year or two: they made some really good sites, from which both the client, the enthusiasts themselves, and the “lovers” on social networks are delighted. And it starts to fly to them more and more orders. And the poor fellows choke, they do not have time to do everything. This is the key moment in the life of their studio, after which there may be different development scenarios.

The studio can be swallowed up by greed and they will start making all the orders in a row. The quality of work will naturally fall, then the reputation will fall. In addition, from constant overload increases nervousness within the team. In the end - the collapse or return to the system "one project at a time."

The studio may begin to expand, but it will not have enough strength to overcome the growth crisis - one of the most powerful challenges for any business. If there were no good managers in the studio or they didn’t come from the side, write to them. Being a mega-developer and managing a team are completely different things, a million articles have already been written about this.
With a successful scenario, our studio will become large, will enter the tops of the ratings, and will become a well-deserved master.

Masters

Studios that "work in the market of web design since 1812." They have hundreds of projects in their portfolios, and on the wall are letters of thanks from the leaders of the automobile and oil concerns.

These studios have several problems that make it difficult to make super-projects:

• matrix system;
• satiety
• urgent need to make a lot of money
• excessive thoroughness
• "Customer service"

The matrix system is when several different designers can draw the same layout (if you want to learn more - you can read, for example, here . In terms of doing business, the matrix system for a web studio is just a find: minimum downtime, maximum security. However, with such a management system, the involvement of the performers in the work on the project is minimal. First, the performer often has to be completed after others, which dulls the creator's instinct. Secondly, it is rarely possible to completely immerse yourself in the project: sometimes even s one day a person is working on two different projects. All this leads to the extinction of the fire in the eyes, and not in the best results. In addition, the matrix system a lot of time spent on resource planning.

Satiety is a very dangerous problem of both the top studios themselves and specific people. Satisfied everything suits, they believe that it is no longer necessary to grow above themselves. It is clear that it does not lead to good.

The need to earn , oddly enough, in most cases destroys the enthusiasm. A large studio devours millions of rubles every month and this money must be constantly taken somewhere and carefully spent. High responsibility for deadlines and budgets leads to the fact that project managers and heads of departments are afraid to experiment and spend overtime.

Excessive thoroughness looks like this: first, we will write the client brief, then we will describe the functional requirements, agree with the client, now the prototypes, reconciliation again ... Months pass, and the project, in fact, has not yet begun.

Customer service in most cases is designed to satisfy all the whims of the client. This leads to the intervention of the client in the process of working on the site, but the intervention takes place completely from afar and sounds like this: “the menu should be raised”, “the plate should be repainted green”, “the workers have too dirty knees in the photo”. As a result, the quality of the site is poor.

Customers

Naturally, customers affect the results of the studios. Among many of them it is considered good form to attribute the layout of the site to an assessment of the first employee with the words “well, how is the picture?”. It rarely comes across a customer who is really willing to work on the project with enthusiasm and strive to make it really quality. It is easier to act as a commentator, especially if the studio tolerates this attitude.

How to become better?

It turns out an interesting situation. At best, small studios can do on average one quality project every few months, and they always have high risks of falling apart or being mistaken due to inexperience. Large studios are very reliable, but too big and cumbersome to allow themselves full involvement in the project. To top it off, almost any studio does not seek to protect the client from itself and allows it to interfere into the work of designers and developers from afar.

I would like to get engagement and reliability in one bottle, and then add to this the constructive participation of the client. How to make it - in the following article.