How a Transactional Relationship with a Vendor Can Be Bad
Have you ever had an idea for a new feature on your website and asked a vendor to make it, only to find that it didn’t meet your needs when it was delivered?
Perhaps you saw a cool menu effect on a competitor’s site, or a search filter that helped you find exactly the information you were looking for. You wrote up specifications and told the vendor exactly what you wanted. They built it, but when it was installed, it didn’t seem to change much for your site’s target audiences, or to solve any of your problems.
This is the downside of a transactional relationship with a vendor. Sometimes, what your website actually needs isn’t obvious. There’s always a lot of hype on the internet about new buzzwords and trends in website design — the chatter can make anything new sound like it’s a magic solution for all problems. But not all organizations have the same needs; what’s perfect for another website might not be right for yours. It can be hard to figure out what change or new feature will truly solve your problem.
Sometimes, you can get what you really want with less cost and effort than you might expect. The key to this puzzle is starting with why — what problem are you trying to solve? You need a vendor who will help you figure this out.
Why a Consultative Relationship with a Vendor is Better
If you go to a transactional vendor, they don’t always understand what already exists, and if you ask them for a wheel, they might reinvent the wheel, or deliver a wheel when you really need a ladder. This is a waste of an organization’s time and money.
At DevCollaborative, we have a consultative process, rather than a transactional relationship with our clients.
We’re very experienced in working with nonprofit clients who have budget caps. We regularly talk our clients out of higher-budget projects. You might think this is detrimental to a business model, but it’s best for our clients in the long term, and they stick with us because they know it.
In our 13 years of experience, these long-term relationships with clients have allowed us to really get to know their’ organizations, their needs and challenges, and how web technology fits into their missions. This type of relationship fosters mutual trust and a spirit of generosity and understanding.
But what if you don’t have that long-term relationship with your web development vendor? DevCollab often partners with new clients who have existing websites, and we need to help them in the same way we’d help an organization we’ve known for years. That’s when it’s more important than ever to start with “Why?”!
To Do More With Less, Start With Why
You wouldn’t go to your car mechanic and ask for a new transmission (or whatever works in this metaphor). You’d describe the problem you’re experiencing and listen to the mechanic’s explanation of what is wrong and what they recommend. You trust the experienced professional to understand your problem and know how to approach a solution.
If you want a new feature on your website, the first thing we’re going to ask you is “Why?”, and what we mean is “What problem are you trying to solve?”.
This helps us take a step back and examine the website as a whole — what you’re using the website for, how it helps you, and how your goals can be achieved with web technology. Maybe that cool new megamenu is exactly what you need. Or, maybe you just need to swap around some labels in your navigation to achieve your goal.
DevCollab strives to be trusted, experienced professionals for your organization. We understand web technology, we know what we’re doing, and if you come to us with your problems, we may be able to find a simpler solution than what you’ve been assuming you need.
We’ll always ask “Why?” to get to the root of the problem you’re trying to solve, and use that as a starting point for discussion and development.
Examples from Our Recent Work
NCLC.org Search Updates
NCLC wasn’t happy with how their in-site search results looked. Search wasn’t finding topic landing pages, and foundational information was buried under long lists of overly-specific or tangential content. NCLC thought that perhaps they needed an upgrade to a more specialized, customized search solution.
We started with a discovery phase and worked to define the problem more precisely - what exactly wasn’t working? Why were the search results so unhelpful? As we examined the current search behavior, we found that instead of customization, what they actually needed was simplification. We kept their search plugin but reconfigured it, removing previous customizations that had been complicating the search algorithm. This simplification led to more useful search results and more efficient long-term site maintenance.
Futures and Options Didn’t Really Need an “Intranet”
FuturesAndoptions.org requested an “intranet” for their website. An intranet is a private website for an organization’s internal use; it can include internal documents, media, calendars, and communication functionality like discussion boards and private messaging. Intranets can be very complex, and the term “intranet” is very general, almost a buzzword for “website that will do whatever we want.”
We asked Futures and Options “Why?” and found out that they didn’t really need anything as complicated as an intranet, they just needed to post information for a specific group of stakeholders in a private place on the website. That’s easy! We scaled the project way back, and built them a new gated section of the website with a simple, secure login and easy-to-edit pages. Now their stakeholders know where to go to find this proprietary information, and Futures and Options has more budget to fund other aspects of their mission.
The Climate Center Events Listing is More Streamlined Than a Full-Featured Calendar
The Climate Center organizes frequent events and promotes them on their website. But they didn’t need a fully-featured calendar. All the events are in the same timezone, most of them are webinars with no real-life location, and they didn’t have enough events to need to filter them.
We created a simplified event post that’s basically just a blog post with a date field. We provided pages listing “past” and “future” events, and that’s all the website needed. Instead of a fully-featured calendar plugin, with all the technical overhead and editorial complexity that entails, our client is happy with their simple event posts and event listing pages.
Partners in Health Found That Reusing Existing Design Components Met Their Needs
PIH came to us with a bespoke design concept for campaigns and asked us to build custom templates. We figured out that we could simplify what they were asking for by reusing existing components from their site’s design. This reduced the cost of the project, simplified the editing experience for PIH staff, and ensured design and user experience consistency with the rest of the website.
Conclusion
When you want to develop a new feature on your website, make sure you’re working with someone whose first instinct is to ask “Why?”. Build a long-term relationship with a vendor who will check assumptions and get to the heart of your requirements, untangling complexity and building efficient solutions that truly meet your needs without unnecessary expense.
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