Architecture - The Big Picture
Who needs a web architect?
A small website with a few dozen pages that attracts a few hundred visitors a day is a relatively straight-forward thing. It doesn't need too much architecture. There are very few technical considerations that need to be considered other than the most basic ones.
When clients build sites any larger than this then we need to consider how it's going to hold up to large numbers of visitors, perhaps hundreds a second, downloading megabytes of data without collapsing, stalling or breaking.
And we've all visited sites where this has happened. Perhaps one of the best examples was when the UK Census information went online a few years ago. Such was the interest and surrounding publicity of the launch that the site crashed in an ungainly heap on the very first day.
It was a PR nightmare and made even more news than the original event. And not all news is good news.
This is avoidable if there is enough thought and architectural design done at the outset.
Building relatively big sites, or sites that will grow over time, takes skills that most web design companies don't have. The skills are essentially those of software and network engineering - matching real technical solutions to real technical problems.
- It's systems engineering - building elegant answers to complex questions - building in reliability, resilience and maintainability from the start, not hastily patched on afterwards.
- It's separating the individual parts of the site so that for exmple the database, the business logic, the front end page rendering and the content management systems are separated but well connected.
- It's about choosing the right web server technologies for the application, be it PHP, ASP, XML, Java, Smarty or Ruby-on-Rails. Or a mixture of all or some.
- It's about fast-prototyping so that bottlenecks and problems can be sorted out early.
- It's real engineering that sorts out the men from the boys, but will save you experiencing the same PR problems that the UK Census people did.
One overlooked problem is a website which becomes very successful, very fast. Take Friends Reunited for example. This started on a shared server, like many other start-up sites, but soon moved to its own more powerful dedicated server, and finally to a cluster of dedicated servers - all with very little downtime or service disruption.
If you have a site now on a shared server, and it's starting to feel a little cramped, then you need a plan to move it now before it's absolutely necessary.
One of the unforeseen problems with shared servers is that you don't know who you're sharing it with.
Many servers have 200 sites on them.
It's Domain congestion gone mad!
All it takes is for just one of the other 200 sites to behave erratically and the whole server may collapse, sinking everyone.
It's like a bomb waiting to go off.
Tick, Tick, Tick.....
Now do you think you may need a web architect?