by Vic Russell
When NOT to do a complete upgrade of a site…
7:38 AM in management, Programming by Vic Russell
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven.
There is a time to sow, and a time to reap…
This Biblical verse is true in agriculture, personal life, as well as merchandising and marketing. You can have the best new ‘feature’ to your web site, but the timing of the release should be carefully considered. If your feature is of minimal impact to the navigation and overall familiarity (look and feel) of the site, then there is little risk in implementation. If, however, you are planning a complete redesign of the presentation and business logic layers, you may consider the time of year for the release.
Why: One retail chain that I had worked for decided that their website needed an upgrade. That was an understatement - the existing site was very dated in both style and functionality. Many features that the underlying web framework offered were inaccessible due to a prior rushed upgrade that ‘broke’ what is a very robust J2EE-based framework. Business and IT knew that a complete rewrite was the only way to efficiently keep the site extensible, maintainable, and scalable. The initial launch date was early September, with a fudge factor of a couple of weeks.
As the months of planning a preparation, design, coding, and testing went by, it was clear that the target date would be missed – by about 2 months! That brought the time of the upgrade to the apex of annual holiday sales season. While this may initially sound like the perfect time to release the site to the customer base, a little more thought might suggest that the opposite is true – it may be the exact wrong time.
