Saturday, July 10, 2010

Develop a second website

Comment posted in my blog
Dear Mr. Tan
Do you really expect the government agency or large company to abandon its current website, where they spend many millions of dollars and thousand of hours of development and training staff, and go for your prototype website?
Are you sure that your website prototye is robust and free of bugs? Can the organisation take the risk?

REPLY
I suggest the government agency or business organisation create a second website, which is linked to their current website by a label such as "Click here to view an alternative, simple website". This will provide an alternative for the public to test. The organisation can measure the number of transactions on the current and new website for 6 to 12 months.

The cost of developing a second website based on my proposed prottype is small, just a few thousand dollars, instead of a few hundred thousand dollars.
If the second website is popular and more than 50% of the transactions have moved over to the second website, the organisation can decide on the time needed to remove the current webiste (which is developed on the spider web concept). If the second website is not popular, it can be also removed in 6 to 12 months time, just by removing the link.

Tan Kin Lian