When people buy our apps, we usually spend a while talking with them about designs and the look and feel of the system they want. Generally, people’s needs are pretty light, most likely due to the amount of time we put into layout and design of our systems in the first place.
Sometimes though, we get requests along the lines of ‘how much would it cost to make this entire system look exactly like our website?’. All well and good, but hard to quote for at times. How much do you want it to look like your site? How firmly are you going to embed it? Does it have to integrate with other systems you’re running?
Ages ago we looked at just replacing the CSS in a system, but the accessibility, usability and cross browser risks are just too great for that to be a sensible approach that’s going to be cost effective in the long run. So to do an in depth job to make a perfect match can add significant time and money.
TImes have moved on though, and it’s pertinent to ask, why bother anyway? With apps like our consultation finder, you can just take content from it using RSS and automatically publish that content in your existing site. Have a look at what Bristol City Council do with data that comes from here and feeds into here. No reskin or design costs needed, the content looks like part of the existing website, because it is part of the existing website.
This trend is growing across the web as well at the moment. Check out Flipboard , an app that takes content from existing Twitter and Facebook accounts, and presents it in a much more intuitive and readable manner. Really quite awesome.
So this may be the way things are going now then. Rather than trying to design a perfect site, why not just open up the data in the site and allow people to apply their own designs to it, or use the data as part of their own website?
It’s a quick win in these times of smaller budgets needing to be made to go further.
