A friend of mine has just gotten his first freelance project: working on a website for a friend of his: the website is about guided tours around Pembrokeshire and the Carmarthen (Wales). Effectively the requirements for him were as follows:
We need to design and build as website for a small company offering guided tours for families or groups going to Wales. The idea is to sell the beauty of Wales as well as the services for either pre-set tours or tailor-made tours based on the client’s wishes.
So in effect he had a very good brief in front of him already. He is a very good designer, and he knows a lot about coding, so he was confident in producing a very good website. The first drafts he made are looking very promising, nice graphics and use of fonts. When I asked him how he was setting the site up and link products and information together he looked a bit stumped. “You know, I haven’t thought of that really, I wanted to come to that when times arises.”…
Looking back at the last couple of years of software development, there are only a few applications that have had a breakthrough in numbers of users: FireFox, Trillian, Skype, Thunderbird, to mention a few. The UGC sites that have grown over the last couple of years (MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, digg, YouTube, to mention a few) can offer a great experience to their users, yet they only work when you are online (and in cases have a good internet connection) and they do not integrate with one’s desktop (other than the “upload file/image” feature).