Bjorn Tipling

The Daily Beast, an interesting news aggregator with original content owned by IAC (my employer) has an iphone version of its site. Very cool of them. However if you go to thedailybeast.com on your iphone it wont redirect you to this iphone version of the site. Huh?

It’s not difficult to understand why if you understand how The Daily Beast site works. Nobody working at The Daily Beast actually does any development or work on the site. They’re all editors and writers. Instead they use an agency, Code and Theory for any development and design. When I worked at Canyon Ranch, I lived in a similar world, the Canyon Ranch marketing department which had no one who understood anything about the web and also used an agency for its website. At Canyon Ranch, a luxury spa resort, this strategy makes sense. When your entire business is the site however, it does not.

Whenever you want to make any kind of change that isn’t baked into the wyswyg site editor the agency created for the dummy writers (such as an iphone version of the site), you’ll have to go through the agency. There’s probably some kind of maintenance plan in the works where the agency makes minor changes and repairs on the site at a price from $150-$200 an hour. But a big thing like an iphone version of a site wouldn’t figure into this plan. The client (in this case The Daily Beast) will ask the agency to draft a proposal, once completed the proposal then has to go to management and executives at the client. That will go back and forth a bit. The entire process will be a back and forth like this, from design, to development, to the final finish. It will cost a lot, not just in dollars, but also in flexibility and time.

Agencies are not replacements for developers. Agencies are focused on sales, billable hours, project management, design, development in that order of precedence. Developers are the dogs at agencies that do whatever everyone else tells them. They have very little input. Developers take the blueprint produced by designers and project managers and monkey code it into existence. The consequences of this is that you have clueless MBA types that maybe know the difference between Wordpress and Typepad, but not much else, making technology decisions. The results are website turds that look nice, but are slow, skip over accessability, and have annoying bugs that creep up all over the place.

Instead of a drawn out, expensive, inflexible process that produces a shoddy product, The Daily Beast should have developers and designers on staff. The benefits of having developers, even if you do use an agency, will include being able to understand what the agency is doing and if they’re pricing makes sense. The benefits will be a better site.

It would also mean that you’d have someone smart enough to realize that if you have a fucking iphone site, you’d forward users on their iphones to it.

Just tested out MapMyRide’s iphone app. It uses the iphone’s GPS functionality to track your progress during a run, ride or walk. I went for a walk, and here are the results:

Not all that accurate. Seems like it thought I doubled back before the 1 mile point and right after the 1 mile point. It said I walked 3.3 miles in about 30 minutes. That’s a quick walk. Heh.