On the Joys of the Single Wringable Neck

And your website is fancy enough to integrate with another system - say your shiny new CRM system or ecommerce store. Let's say you've organised hosting for your website. All is well, everything works.

Well, works for a while ... but then, disaster strikes! You notice that your ecommerce transactions are not making it into your CRM. Who do you call? Is it the web developers? The CRM vendors? The hosting provider? Your telecoms provider?

With the what now?

There could be a break anywhere in the chain: maybe the website back-end is acting up. Maybe a new browser version is breaking the javascript on your pages. Maybe your application isn't listening to website messages. Maybe a system upgrade wiped some critical settings to parse the messages. Maybe the web server is broken. Maybe the application server is broken. Who knows?

You're in for a headache stemming from invoking support costs from vendors who have nothing to fix, lengthy email tennis sessions where each party says "it's the other guy's problem" and a long, painful journey to resolution.

More than one site, you say?

The same thing can happen in the case where you have a single server with lots of websites built by different agencies. If one site misbehaves the first question is: 'who built that one again?' Server upgrades can be very difficult with different technologies being used on different sites, different dependencies and different vendors with varying levels of support. And if a server-level change affects the sites on it, who should own that problem?

Ow, my head hurts.

Before a project has even gone live you can have trouble when engaging with too many vendors. Bringing in different specialist agencies for content architecture, design, front-end development and back-end development might sound like a great idea, but it comes with the price of increased communication overhead, and more importantly, work one agency produces in its silo can seriously impact another. Specialists working without the knowledge of how the overall system fits together can be a dangerous game.

There is hope.

When Annertech supports and hosts a website, we introduce the concept of the Single Wringable Neck. If your website looks funny, you know who to call. If it isn't sending email or XML messages, you know who to call. If it's plain flat out broken, or offline, you certainly know who to call. It doesn't matter if it's a connectivity, server or application issue: we'll get it solved. We might bicker internally over whose issue it should be, but you don't need to know, or care. The important thing is that it stops being your problem and becomes ours.

We also extend the concept to the entire website/application lifecycle. With designers and content strategists on hand, and a team of excited front and back end developers at the ready, we can be that Single Wringable Neck from day one, past launch and through the site's entire functional life. We're with you every step of the way.

Want to have our necks available for wringing? Great - you can "wring" us on 01 524 0312 or email to hello@annertech.com