In the Web design business (similar to the construction industry), time is money. That’s why you’ll always find that professionals place such an emphasis early in the project life cycle on creating a strategy or game plan for the work. It pays to find problems early!
Some interesting statistics to consider:
- It’s just 1x the cost to make changes to your Web site project during the planning/strategy/design phase.
- It rapidly goes up to 5x cost to make those same changes during the development/coding phase.
- That’s right, it sky-rockets to 25x cost to make changes when the site is mostly complete and undergoing formal testing pre-publication.
You can’t afford NOT to find problems early!
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, TRW, and other organizations have found that purging an error by the beginning of a construction (in our case, at the beginning of a Website project) allows re-work to be done 10 to 100 times less expensively than when it’s done in the last part of the process, during system test, or after release.