The web is business. It could almost be a marketing slogan or the title of a technology conference in its own right. But in this case, the statement is simply meant to remind us that organisations of every kind now rely upon their web presence to act as the shop window, warehouse and employee workplace for all their daily operations.
Given the essential role that the internet plays in modern business, we need to stop and ask whether we have built the commercial frameworks that rely upon it with an overly assumptive approach. Ask the average marketing, sales or business development person how long they think it takes to move website mechanics around and the answer is typically quite dismissive.
Wrangle a few pixels?
“Umm, hello yes web team, this is commercial unit X on the top floor. We need new customer offers, a new login process for partners and some pretty colours to celebrate International Day of the [insert celebration here], so if you could just wrangle a few pixels around and do it, that’d be great, thanks.”
Of course, the commercial team isn’t quite that assumptive, dismissive and obnoxious in real life, or are they? We do tend to think of the web as a magically-fuelled self-perpetuating organism where things just happen; people that have never learned any HTML or ever spent time inside a Content Management System (CMS) might just think like this.