One of the issues that has been plaguing me for the last couple of years is the issue of bringing the design of a website closer to the functional requirements of a website. Web development, in my opinion, involves the creation of frameworks that allow a business requirement to be effectively represented in a web-based environment. Often this involves the analysis of a business requirement and translating that business requirement into a functional business resource. At the end of the day a web-based resource for any business should be a functional one that speaks directly to your business need. The process of developing a website should ideally start off by looking at your business and specifically looking at the way your business is structured. It helps, but is not necessary, if your business has a strategic model by which it defines itself. A strategic model, however, is not necessary to build a great and effective web-based resource. What is needed, though, is a good understanding of what your business does. By understanding what your business does and by defining what it does in a formal manner, you can develop a web-based resource. Formal definitions may need to be captured, and I think that it makes sense to develop a strategy that allows you to capture the way your business works in a way that is easy to access and edit at any given time. The key to capturing information about your business is to actively keep it up-to-date, because effectively you are developing your business even more by defining it. One way to capture business-related information is to use a wiki. Wikipedias are great for sharing information in a structured way, and allowing others to contribute to that information in a collaborative and sharing manner. A wiki can be created within a business environment with a minimal amount of effort, and it should ideally be used to store definitions that are unique within your business. I have found that if I compile information in a narrative fashion before I build a solution, I tend to develop a better understanding of the solution I am building. The most popular wiki software available has to be MediaWiki. It requires Apache, PHP and MySQL to work and takes less than 30 minutes to install and configure. Popular websites such as Facebook use a wiki to store information relating to their API’s, Markup Language (FBML), Query Language (FBQL) and JavaScript (FBJS). I have seen or heard people compare Wiki’s to Blogs, but I do believe and strongly feel that they are not the same. Blogs have a chronological nature, whereas wiki’s have a more static nature. Wiki’s also differ because a wiki works on a search-and-if-not-found-create basis. It means that if you do not find an item that you search for, you can create that item.
