Post on 27-Dec-2015
About Me
Over two decades in the Hi-Tech industry
Technical & Engineering positions
Always HANDS ON
Experienced technical entrepreneur
Current position: CTO & Co-Founder at Evolero
Let’s Talk About …
Know your neighborhood
Common vs. Unique
Who’s in our team?
Solutions overview
Some user stories …
System parts / features
Data persistency (DB)
Back end
Front end
Back-office / Administration tools (upload products etc.)
Reports – given, custom
Emails – receipts, notifications, newsletters etc.
Backups
Hosting
Shared (GoDaddy) Performance …
SaaS (Shopify, Etsy, ebay, Amazon) Customizations …
My servers (location is important) Physical Cloud
Common vs. Unique
CMS platforms – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento Self installed OR SaaS Given modules Designs Developers – usually for the latest version
Unique Custom modules for existing platforms Scratch development
Be AWARE from …
“We have our own platform that does …”
“I can develop it in a week …”
Too cheap solutions from young people
Agencies (over rated, their common practices) – check carefully what you get
Common vs. Unique
Common Same behaviors, funnels, flows Usually same designs & blocks Can develop custom modules but its hard to fully
customize
Unique Your own flows (do you need it?) Your special UI – better experience If done right, better performance
Example – using Drupal views Scaling cheaper
Who’s in our team?
Architect
Designer
SEO / Marketing
Developer/s – custom modules, front-end, back-end
IT / Maintenance
Architect
Analyze your needs
Which technologies / solutions are best for MY needs
Help me find a developer / agency
Define maintenance procedures
Take me hand-in-hand along the procedure
Cost effective in medium/large projects
Designer
“Make it nice”
Experience in mobile & web
A (common) designer is NOT a UX/UI expert!
YOU should give the flows, hierarchies etc.
Use real content when reviewing
SEO / Marketing
Be aware of amateurs
SEO requirements are part of the website structure
Analysis & changes may need code change, especially in product pages etc.
BE AWARE – recent cool front-end technologies are NOT SEO friendly!
Developers – what is this?
Web development – low barrier Many cheap web developers (mainly PHP) No large scale experience
Usually using their best known technology
If not well defined, you may not get exactlywhat you expected
Developers – what to look for?
Experienced in more than one technology
Available for long time ahead for maintenance
Using common practices & technologies
Can support previous releases / versions
Front-end / back-end
IT / Maintenance
Keep your system monitored and running
Backups procedures
Expansion options
SLA – downtime is money!
Usually freelancers
SaaS
Etsy Shopify Amazon …
Pay attention How much can I customize? What if I want to move? Exports? Customer base?
WordPress
WordPress
Almost everything ready Themes Plugins for almost everything Very common platform (for developers as well), PHP
based Installations options (shared servers, dedicated
hosting etc.)
Other CMS / Platforms
Mostly out-of-the-box
Existing themes / easy customizations
Modules / Plugins
BEWARE of older versions maintenance – hard to find programmers/agencies
Custom Developments
MVC Frameworks Ruby on Rails (Ruby) Django (Phyton) PHP frameworks
Front-End frameworks (Javascript based) AngularJS Ember
Mobile Native (iOS, Android) PhoneGap , Ionic