ASMP provides a sample email that you can send in as a photographer, so we modified it so that it relates to Web developers. I highly suggest you and anyone you know contacts the IRS regarding this issue.

TO: Notice.comments@irscounsel.treas.gov

RE: Notice 2010-51

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am a Web developer and a small business person. I have virtually no administrative staff to handle my record-keeping and reporting responsibilities. The new requirement under Section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code would place impossible burdens on me. While the credit card exemption certainly helps, it does not go far enough.

I often pay for server licenses, computer equipment, hosting, ISP bandwidth, advertising and other items by check. Those expenditures often total more than $600 per vendor in any given year. Having to keep separate track of each of these items — and then to issue Form 1099’s to each vendor — would simply take more time than I have as the owner of a very small business operation, and it would require back office support that I do not have and cannot afford.

Please change the requirements so that they apply only to larger business entities, such as persons or entities that employ more than 25 people.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

With traditional Waterfall development, you wait until the very end of a large set of features to deploy a site. This method is usually the standard concept of how Web sites are created: decide what you want, and wait for it to be created. The problem is if there are a lot of features you may be waiting weeks, months or years before your first release! With “Release Early, Release Often”, the developer is typically using an agile method, which in a nutshell means building the site feature by feature, and releasing as soon as possible.

Effect on Cost

E-commerce sites are great examples of the benefits of releasing early and often. Let’s say you have a site that will take six months to develop using traditional software development practices (release when everything is implemented and finalized). During those six months your profit from the site is $0. Once you hit the sixth month and the site goes live, your sales and visibility steadily increase. IBy the end of the year you bring in a total of $50,000 in sales.

Now let’s follow the release early, release often practice. After the first month you have a very basic e-commerce site ready. It does not have the blog and news sections, you don’t accept PayPal and some of the categorization features aren’t available yet. The site goes live and customers start making orders. Meanwhile you are under way having the next set of features created. A new set of updates is made to the site every week. By the sixth month your original set of features is complete. And by the sixth month you have brought in $30,000 of sales. By the end of the year you have brought in $160,000 in sales simply because your site has been available to uses for five additional months! In essence the site pays for itself by going live early.

Requirements Changes

It is a fact that requirements change over time. Business decisions are made that effect the priorities of feature sets, or deadlines are moved and require modification of the original project scope. With a larger project these changes can be debilitating to releasing a product. In the example above where an e-commerce took six months to release using the traditional method, what if you (the client) were forced to move to a new inventory management system midway through the project? That type of major change could push back the schedule weeks or months. So now your six month deadline has now become eight months, and you still don’t have a site bringing in any profit. With the release often approach, you can make these shipping changes incrementally with each new release until you are fully migrated to the new system.

Early User Feedback

It doesn’t matter how great you think your new website will be, it matters what the end-user thinks. By releasing early you are able to receive user feedback immediately, which will allow you to make adjustments, assess the potential return on investment, or scrap the project entirely. If your site receives poor feedback and you aren’t hitting the revenue benchmarks needed to continue, you are able to cut your losses early. If you had used the waterfall method and released after the project was completed, you will have spent over twice the time and money just to hear this feedback.

Security and Reliability

No matter how well tested a site is, there are always going to be small bugs that are uncovered as your site’s visibility increases. With a traditional approach you will have to wait until your next set of features is complete (which could be another six months) before these issues are fixed. If you are releasing often though, it may only be a few days before these issues are fixed. With a Web-based product you should always take advantage of being able to release updates instantly with no interaction from the user. If there is a minor bug occurring only to a select group of users, you can fix that issue instantly before anyone else experiences the problem.

Think Small

The major point of releasing early and often is to take small features and build them out quickly and efficiently. All too often we see companies delaying projects entirely just to fit in one more feature they feel is necessary for customers to stay on their site. The reality is most of these features go unnoticed. Your first goal should be getting your site online with the minimum number of features possible. From there you can continue to build your site as you receive vital feedback from the users, and plan your next set of features and changes based on those comments. You can’t build a house without laying the foundation first, and there is no sense in delaying the entire project simply because the light switches you wanted aren’t available.

At the Riddle Brothers we have an internal wiki that we use for just about everything - from our Operations Manual to client information to project management purposes. It is essentially an open repository of knowledge that can be referenced at any time. How would your company benefit from a wiki?

One Common Reference Point

Your wiki is the brain of your business. If you continually update your wiki over time, it can be referred to for absolutely everything. Prior to using a wiki we used various spreadsheets in Google Docs. Over time we had dozens of spreadsheets with different permissions going out to various users. Then new version were created for the new business year and formats changed over time. After our third year of Google Docs we decided to move to the wiki format and it has made life much more simple. We still use Google Docs for a lot of purposes but more for client purposes rather than internal references.

Internal Operations

How many times have you tried to find out how to complete a task, and your co-worker said “go ask Jim, he knows how to handle that”? Your entire division may be relying on the knowledge of one person who may one day decide to leave the company. If you use a wiki you can build up your documentation so your co-worker instead says “look in the operations section of the wiki”. A wiki is a living site that should be updated daily whenever you are completing a new task. You can store server configurations, login credentials (make sure you secure your server and use an encrypted network), human resources documents, and pretty much everything. Every time someone asks you how to do something check to ensure it is available in the wiki. If not then you can add a page and never have to answer the same question twice.

New Employee Training

Hiring a new employee? Have them read through the wiki on their first day. You can include a section for new employees with everything they will need to know about the company in general, as well has how to operate on a day-to-day basis. This works particularly well with office jobs where you are in front of a computer 90% of the day and can access the wiki at all times. You could also keep printed copies on hand although they may quickly become out-dated depending on how well maintained your information is and how routine that positions’ tasks are.

Permissions and Accessibility

If you aren’t using a wiki then you probably use some type of local network for sharing documents that contain this information. Maybe you have a VPN or use Dropbox to sync folders of this information. However if you are keeping internal documentation stored here you are not benefiting from other features of a wiki including version control, page-based permissions, and being able to access the information when outside of your network. Also there are a large number of extensions that can be integrated to cover nearly every common purpose. This is not possible on a local network of files unless you are using a separate application such as a web-based intranet.

Cost Effective

While there are commercially available wikis (usually a paid-hosting suite) the software that powers Wikipedia is available for free (it is open-source). No software licenses means you only have to pay for hosting, the domain, and the cost to have it installed and configured. Most companies will want some branding integration which is also possible with a majority of solutions - some even featuring a full templating system for advanced themes.

Convinced?

As I mentioned we use a wiki for 90% of our internal documentation. I usually have it open in a browser window throughout the day in case I need to refer to it or add something.

If you are interested in finding out more, or would like to get a wiki set up for your company let us know!

Fuel Your Creativity has put together a fantastic list of 13 items to keep in mind when designing your Web site for a mobile device.

Read the full article:

13 Tips To Improve Your Site’s Accessibility From Mobile Devices

It is no surprise that the “About Us” page is one of the most frequently accessed pages of any Web site (aside from the home page obviously). Therefore this highly-viewed page should be given the same amount of design attention as your home page!

Smashing Magazine has posted an in-depth compilation of some of the best and most visually attractive “About Us” pages from across the Web .

Read the full article:

Best Practices For Effective Design Of “About us”-Pages

Giving some thought to re-designing your “About Us” page? Contact us today to see how we can help!

However there are a few things that you should know about search engines and how they are working nowadays. Gone are the days of submitting your site to “search engine directories” and loading your sites meta tags with keywords. SitePoint offers up some of the newest trends in a recent article.

Read the full article:

SEO: What’s Hot and What’s Not

An excerpt from the article states:

Research confirms that users make aesthetic decisions about the overall visual impression of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). These instant visceral reactions to web pages happen in virtually all users, are consistent over visit length, and strongly influence the user’s sense of trust in the information. In short, users have made fundamental, consistent, and lasting aesthetic decisions about the credibility and authority of sites before major eyetracking events begin.

Read the full article:

Visual Decision Making

Eric Karjaluoto of Ideas on Ideas presents a short story on the failure of one law firm to see the value in having a marketable Web site, and why it makes no sense to spend lavishly on other business features but let your brand suffer.

Read the full article:

Sweatpants Forever?

Read the full article:

How to Make the Web Work for Your Business in 5 Steps

Thinking about a Web site for your business or organization?

Contact us for a free estimate and project proposal.