5 tips for walking the tightrope between flexibility and automation in website building

Here's a challenge I've had for as long as I can remember in my career as a digital/ website manager: walking the tightrope between manually catering for ad hoc requests and building an automated scalable engine.

The problem: We all want automation, but...

... But we also want that button to be green instead of blue, and we also want that visual asset to be placed exactly HERE, 267 pixels to the left of THAT thing. Regardless of technical evolution in content management systems, the core problem is still fairly binary. Either you ask your frontenders to code that thing for that campaign, or you ask your stakeholders to put their cool ideas back into the drawer and just use the damn templates ??

In fast paced companies the problem grows. If you rely on your out-of-the-box build to serve the vast majority of content, then the added lead time to involve UX'ers and developers to change the top banner template just this one time is the difference between launching your campaign on time or too late.

The bottom line: Bespoke doesn't scale, and you can't have it both ways. Yet... Even with the world's largest box of LEGOs at your disposal, sometimes you just need a brick that doesn't already exist.

Here are 5 tips for walking the tightrope:

1: Don't build for a specific scenario. Build for wider application.

Sometimes a thing is just a thing. It serves one purpose for a limited period of time. In itself, from a website build perspective, it's uninteresting. It's like that dress you buy for a party and then never wear again. High investment, limited use. But maybe it's a particularly cool dress that with some slight modding can be worn again and again. Then it might be worth your while as a stepping stone to improve your general build and the options you offer your editors going forward.

2: Assess the ROI and estimated life time of the bespoke solution

Spending 30 hours of dev work to do a flashy, on brand animated interactive banner for your Valentine's campaign is a cost to hold against the expected return. If you own a traffic heavy website it can be worth it. But in my experience, more often than not, it isn't. It's 30 hours out the window and a missed opportunity to spend everyone's time on truly innovating instead. I personally always convert any time spent by my team to actual cost. Say the average hourly rate of your specialists is 200$. That's 6,000$ to build that banner. Would you pay an agency 6,000$ for this?

3: Don't underestimate the increased maintenance and fragility introduced by bespoke solutions

More than just the build, test & launch time, consider that your monster now lives and needs to be fed for a looong time. I find that most exceptions and bespoke solutions tend to come back to haunt you. At some point the person who built the thing isn't there anymore, and after a while everyone has forgotten that you always display your prices without decimals, except for the French locale where a script mods the price rendering. And all of a sudden you've got stakeholders pinging you unnerved that the latest changes to your price styling isn't applied to the French locale. The more exceptions and bespoke solutions you build, the more nightmarish this gets.

4: Is it cool? Like, really cool?

Cool beats everything if you ask me. But I don't mean cool as in that thing someone saw on apple.com and could we have that on our site as well? I mean really cool, as in original. There's little true originality in web design today and a lot of copying. But sometimes a truly original idea comes along, one that will make your website or interface or build stand out, and that should be honoured. This is the stuff that separates the A-tier experiences from the B-tier. It's high risk, high reward, because it takes time to build cool. And maybe you end up with a discount solution and not the real deal. But it's generally worth it, because great ideas are rare.

5: Push back just a little

Many bespoke solutions are built on a whim. Your boss is in the shower Thursday morning and gets a great idea, and now all of a sudden this is the top prio. Hold on, wait, what? This is where you push back, not to be a nay-sayer but to explore the depth of the idea. Ask questions. How do you imagine this would be built? Can you add more details as to how you would like this new interactive hero element to work? How much do you think this will impact success metric A, B or C? Pushing back isn't the same as being annoying. You are just providing the expert insight you were hired to provide to ensure that what gets done is in fact the most impactful stuff. Your boss may have found a gold nugget. Your boss may also have mistaken a piece of rock for a gold nugget. Before you invest, do your due diligence. Gently and with an optimistic approach to embracing ideas and suggestions.

Thank you for reading ???