Great article from the Economist:
For small brands fighting for recognition in crowded markets, almost any publicity is beneficial, he reckons. One reason is that, for lesser-known brands, negative perceptions fade more quickly in consumers’ minds than their general awareness of the product. When coming across a brand whose boss is, say, a philanderer, they recognise it but don’t remember why. With established brands, on the other hand, the whiff of bad publicity lingers longer.
I’m not a fan of web-based site creation tools. You get locked in, you have to learn skills specific to the vendor which are of no further use, and if you bring in outside expertise, you’ll end up paying for the time they spend learning to use the platform. But there is space for them, for rapid prototyping, and temporary sites. In my opinion it is best to get someone to do it for you, unless the knowledge gained from resources spent adds to your own marketable value.
This is pretty much Geoffrey Moore’s Core and Context approach to managing businesses, applied to web development. Core is sustainable competitive advantage, and commands a premium in the marketplace; context is everything else. One’s Context can be another’s Core. For example, Payroll is most likely your context, but it is ADP’s core. You should externalize your context to a service provider whose core it is, as their marginal cost is likely lower than your full cost, they gain from economies of scale, etc.
Context is not necessarily unimportant. It can be mission critical, like website uptime or even payroll. Core is measured in Excellence, Context by Good enough. So if your business does marketing consulting, then a Good enough website is what you want. If you do Web-based CRM, then you want Excellent. In the former example, clients won’t pay you more if your website has the latest Scriptaculous effects, but they will if your counsel is truly awesome. In the latter, clients will love your product and be willing to pay more for it if it is excellent.
However do note that these are not rules, but guidelines. If you are strapped for cash and have a lot of free-time, things are different.
Part two on building web applications.
If your website is Core to you, then bare in mind the following:
Use other people’s code. Don’t reinvent the wheel. By this I don’t mean steal other people’s code, but use open source or licensed software for the components you can. Not only do you not have to write and maintain the code, you also get future improvements for free. This again applies the Core and Context methodology inside the application itself. You have to find out what parts of the application are Core and which are Context. This also means that you have to develop your integration skills, your capacity to bring parts together and make them work.
Use other people’s services. A corollary to the above is to look for web services and APIs, as well as the cloud computing technology (There was an excellent VLab session on this: http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=188) to replace components of your application. Hardware, updates, trips to the datacenter is probably not your idea of fun. Get a company like Cloud in Code to help (disclaimer: my company).
Iterate often. At the crux of the web 2.0 generation, and key benefit of being agile, is the ability to iterate through the measure / conduct experiments / adapt process quickly. This means building your application to make experimentation as easy as possible. This includes the user interface, for which I recommend Appcelerator.
It is very popular among economists to bring up the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Notably when assessing the challenge of China and India, to the old world economies of Europe and the United States.
In case you have forgotten. 
The Red Queen is Regent of a “Fast” country.
In the book the queen is somewhat puzzled by Alice’s “Slow sort of country“.
The Red Queen tell Alice “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” .
Based on this the Call to arms we hear from economists usually goes something like this:
The western world needs to pull up its collective socks, fix its educational system, think long term and reallocate its resources into less frivolous, less instant gratification endeavors. We must stop dilly-dallying and act like a grown up if we want to preserve our privileged position in the world.
This is not true, we are in great shape.
As a society we have climbed the hill and we can now pretty much coast for the duration.
Few economists and fewer politicians have realized it, but we have entered a new economic phase. Now the current structure of the economy combined with Moore’s law is giving the economy such a tail wind that a substantial yearly growth in the standard of living is not only secure but accelerating almost regardless of what we do, bar nuclear doomsday.
Let me explain. Economists notably Monetarists likes to talk about Units and Price. The economy is made up of a lot of different Units that are transacted at different prices and the GDP is the sum total of all those. Inflation is the delta weighted average of all those prices and real growth is the weighted increase in all those units. Simple as that.
The different units are affected by Moore’s law to a varying degree. Units like Computers, Cell phones and MP3 players follow a Moore’s law almost directly whereas barley, pumpkin and electricity production is affected to a significant lesser degree.
The key point however is that everything is affected to some degree and this portion is growing each year.
Bio Tech is currently exceeding Moore’s law as the capabilities afforded by compute power transformed the industry and a huge catch up is underway. This translates directly into health care units and we will see the effects over the coming decade. We are talking about big chunks of the economy.
Entertainment is being transformed as CGI replaces physical models and actors. Not only in animated movies like Toy Story but all films are affected to a varying degree as A Night at the Museum will attest too. The design content of a car or a dish washer is going up and the cost of the parts is falling relatively. Everything is being transformed.
The key is the content of Moore’s law in the units of the economy and the mix of those units in their totality.
This is where the western world excels. We have transformed our economy towards the elements highly driven by technology acceleration. We spend less than 5% on food and groceries compared to 70% for the developing world.
This transformation is what allows us to coast and help the rest of the world with little impact on ourselves whereas the less fortunate geographical areas has a long haul in front of them.
Assume a conservative 20% extraction of our economy follows Moore’s law 100% and that this portion of the economy continues to grow at its historic rate of 10% annually. The 10% is what we have seen in the pure areas like Computer’s and Communications so it is probably a good if somewhat conservative assumption.
Combine this with the normal 3.0% general price inflation we have seen over the last decade and the result is truly astounding. Based on Moore’s law alone our economy will grow at an annual clip of 2.5% in constant dollars, we will experience a raw 8.7% deflation measured in prices of unchanged units and unit mix and a whopping 15.6% increase in unit based standard of living. Every year regular as a clockwork. I repeat, this is not a prediction for the overall economic development of the western world this is the impact from Moore’s law alone.
Rather than fret over our lack of “seriousness” we should watch more movie preferably download them from home, buy iPods in bulk, substitute teachers for technology, replace psychiatrists with medication. In general do everything we can to tilt the economy toward the amazingly free ride afforded us.
All this from shrinking transistors on a die.
Pat Haggerty co-founder of Texas Instruments said back in the 70′s that Semiconductor would replace oil as the “fuel” of the 21′st century. Astounding prescience.