A couple of nights ago I was concepting an ecommerce solution for a friend-of-the-family small jewelry business using the shopify platform. For $24 a month and very little time on my part, I could have a fully functioning ecommerce solution I could confidently hand over to a non tech-savvy small business client with the assurance that they could easily update their catalog, blog, and secondary content pages without much hand holding from me. Plus, the front-end was almost completely customizable, template-driven, and already contained many of the SEO and ecom techniques we covet in the world of corporate ecommerce (SEO, Google Sitemaps, etc., etc.).

I was incredibly excited at the prospect of introduing it to this business. As with most businesses recently, the downturn in the economy has hit him hard. This well-built, cheap, and easy to learn tool could be the key to opening up avenues of business he may have never dreamed of — and an opportunity to level the playing field against the giants of his industry.

It’s just this leveling of the playing field that should be an ever-growing concern of large ecommerce sites across the web. My bread and butter comes from working at a large corporation selling consumer electronics. One thing you should (or maybe do) know about many corporate web shops is they are slow, lumbering giants when it comes to current trends, standards, and change. Often times their web operations are controlled by outside consulting firms, which in my experience are mired in the same red tape that prohibits progress in their clients. Or better yet, the big consulting firms actually inhibit progress with their lack of knowledge (or is it denial?) of the way things work. Regardless of the situation, just keeping up is incredibly expensive, difficult, and time consuming. And once a corporate project is approved, funded, fought over, and finally implemented, the new concept or fix has already fallen woefully behind the technology curve.

Meanwhile, smart new startups continue to emerge to wage a battle against the big guns for marketshare — hence the title of this piece, “Guerrilla Webfare”. These nimble, agile, savvy, forward-thinking groups have the ability to take big chunks of market share away from big corporate sites. Outside of the sheer number of products, what advantages do larger corporate web operations hold over their smaller counterparts?

If the corporate ecom sites of the world truly want to deliver the best to their customers and continue to survive and thrive, a different mentality has to be put into place. Adopting iterative, agile practices on flexible core systems is key. Embracing and implementing standards makes the internet a better place for all. And for God’s sake, stop paying through the nose for overly-expensive consulting that has little ROI and cripples innovation when you could be passing those savings on to a grateful and deserving consumer.

Do I mean nothing to you anymore? I mean, we sit in these meetings together and you pretend like I don’t even exist. Take yesterday for example: one of your cronies even said something like, “I don’t consider it code, like in the truest sense of the word”, or something along those lines. Oh, the arrogance and ignorance you portray sometimes. You and your buddies pacify me for a while, listening as I name off a growing list of needs that will help drive our business and utilize true and open standards for our markup, providing rich user experiences and a more informed consumer. But at the end of the day I always seem to come in last. The important conversations eventually trail off into some incomprehensible business cliche-ridden rant, in which the “action items” are really never acted upon.

Let me be frank. I am important. I provide lightweight, semantically rich markup DIRECTLY to the browser. I sit at the heart of most “Web 2.0″innovation (I hate to use the term, but I feel it’s the only language you might understand). While you languish in the background, stumbling over little details and wasting time in futile attempts to get it right, I am out there doing things that make a difference in an agile and cost-effective way.

I realize you may be a little threatened by all the focus on my front-end, as your bloated back-end has been used to all the attention for a while. There’s no shame in admitting that you don’t quite get what I do. It’s time to admit that the times are changing, and you should change as well, or I fear we will have to part ways – me, innovating, changing and evolving, and you, wallowing in yesterday’s glory years.

Oh, by the way, I’m platform AGNOSTIC… and it’s fantastic.

To start, I first want to say “thanks” for employing me and helping me grow my career. I appreciate the opportunities afforded by a company of our size and influence to give me the visibility and access to expand my knowledge, make industry contacts, and grow beyond the confines of our corporate walls.

That being said, we need to talk.

All of this outside exposure has really opened my eyes to the issues we have internally. Sure, we know we have things to work on, but like any long term relationship, we have learned to ignore the bigger stuff, or create temporary workarounds (I call them “hacks”). Unfortunately, it is clear that this method of operation no longer suits our needs. In order for us to survive, thrive, iterate and innovate, I have a “honeydo” list of activities you should strongly consider to regain my trust and admiration.

In no particular order:

• Identify (org chart, heirarchy), grow, and properly fund web silo, handing reponsibility to those who truly “own the web site”. Please pull front-end development, design, and innovation out of marketing and IT.
• Truly separate back end from presentation layer.
• Fund and implement continual upgrade plan for core systems.
• Stop creating disjointed user experiences by farming out work to random agencies and slapping the brand on their work.
• Say no to “rush jobs” or solutions that need hacks/ workarounds.
• Start creating customer-centric design, not driven by corporate requirements, but customer needs.
  • Transition from manufacturer-funded model to independent model that serves customer needs better.
  • Continually perform analysis of features of the site and iterate off those findings
• Develop clean data models worthy of distribution, realizing that the web site isn’t the only place this will be used. Once clean data is established, design the web tools necessary to allow individuals to create their own experience, and help them make sense of the data.
• Stop making poor decisions (or no decisions at all) based off “political” considerations.
• Be OK with failure. When things do fail, be willing to admit it and do the analysis so you don’t make the same mistake in the future.

I will be watching anxiously at the progress you make in completing these goals. Remember, our future together and that of subsequent brands and initiatives depends on it!

Yours,

Jay

I was in one of my favorite computer stores the other day and I happened to catch a bit of a conversation between a salesperson and a customer regarding an extended service plan on a laptop. The man simply said, “at $750 dollars, I’ll use it for a year and throw it away.” I’d like to know where his garbage is.

This is the same person who’ll bitch about gas price being too high.

I equate gaining marketshare in this internet economy to a millitary conflict. The army that wins will be swift, quick to react — guerilla in nature. It will be able to mobilize a smaller number of forces in a shorter period of time to achieve a greater impact.

We (my company) are the Goliath of the war. Great in number, but slow to react. Plodding, marching slowly, sometimes just keeping up.

I feel a revolution is in order.

So I’ve been preaching web standards for a while here at work. The trouble I’ve had with that is our technology folk always want concrete examples of what standards are — they want to quantify it, make it a number. “How big should a page be?”. “How many divs should we have on the page?” These phrases have been regurgitated by the higher-ups and the standards-challenged. Just the lack of understanding, even by the supposed front-end “experts” we’ve hired to do this work is nauseating.

I believe, however, I may get some sort of relief from the sickness I’m feeling. I was tooling around microformats.org when I happened upon a concept that I believe embodies the premise of my arguments to these people — the Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) methodology. Man, have I been ignorant to this acronym for the last 5 years. Simple, semantic markup that benefits the web and creates semantic not presentational code. Beautiful.
This is my new tool to combat bloat, non-standards and ignorance.