Web Reliability
The Book
Table of Contents
Introduction
You're responsible for a revenue-generating website. There are hundreds of experts giving you advice and pulling you in different directions. Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to just step back and understand the big picture?
Web Reliability is an overarching structure for thinking about a web property. It serves as an organizing principle and a roadmap, a meaningful tool to help owners of web properties keep track of how well they are – or aren’t - delivering on promises to their customers. At its essence, Web Reliability is a checklist of must-haves, the website essentials needed to ensure customers get their needs met. Web Reliability as defined here is a comprehensive guide, but it is not intended to be exhaustive. It is a work in progress and will continue to evolve over time.
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1. Overview
You're responsible for a revenue-generating website. There are hundreds of experts giving you advice and pulling you in different directions. Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to just step back and understand the big picture?
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2. Who benefits from Web Reliability?
Your website exists to serve your customer. You earn and keep your customer's loyalty when they can flow smoothly through your well-designed web system to get what they need, every time.
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3. What’s in the way of customer success, and how does the Web Reliability Framework help?
What is preventing a website customer from getting what they seek? You! And who can fix that? You!
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4. What is a revenue-generating website?
Think about it. In reality, every website is a revenue-generating website. But some are better at making money than others. Why is that?
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5. What does reliability mean?
Healthy websites are reliable in the same way airplanes are reliable. Millions of precision parts work reliably together in unison to keep the thing from crashing.
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6. Why reliable revenue matters
Money is like water. It flows. Hopefully through your website. And your customer should be able to do the same thing. Because it's their nature to flow too. If you let them!
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7. What about growth?
Go! Go! Go! Grow! Grow! Grow! Hey wait, what happened? How come we're going out of business now?
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8. Flow as a first principle
As air flows over the wing of an airplane, it creates lift. The more reliable the airflow, the more reliably the plane stays in the air. Consistent flow means consistent success. Websites work in exactly the same way.
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9. What is it that's flowing?
Water molecules flow through a pipe. Electrons flow through a circuit. Customers flow through a website. It’s all about the flow.
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10. What is the Web Reliability Framework?
Customer flow is the single most important indicator of website reliability. How does it work? We've deconstructed Web Reliability into a 3 x 3 matrix that spells out the 9 components of a well-run revenue-generating website.
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11. How do I use it?
The Web Reliability Framework can be used as a planning tool as well as a problem-solving tool. The framework helps you plan your website, optimizing customer flow for reliability. The framework can also help you troubleshoot a site where reliability is failing.
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12. Who the hell are you?
The Web Reliability Framework is a synthesis of what my team, my colleagues, and myself have learned over 20 years of web development.
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13. A note on structure
This book presents ideas about Web Reliability in a different format than the conversations, tweets, and blog posts that I’ve shared over time. Of course, it's longer, but it’s also more detailed and opinionated.
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14. Acknowledgements
I would like to first thank the Solspace team who has shown tremendous patience and steadfastness over a long period of time. They were the folks who actually generated this thought leadership, through their daily diligence, professionalism, and love of service.
Reliable Plan
A web property that reliably generates revenue embraces the importance of planning that in turn embraces the concept of flow. Good flow addresses three components: motivation, resistance, and management.
In the context of planning, motivation is like pressure and corresponds to the methods whereby customers in need are targeted and guided into a web property's sales pipeline and in what volume. Resistance in the planning context corresponds to keeping the web sales pipeline clean and flowing, allowing a customer to easily move from first contact to conversion with minimal difficulty or delay. Management at the strategic level refers to validating strategic choices prior to taking action through analysis, testing, and historical experience.
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27. Desire, Purpose and Guidance
Just as Virgil guided Dante out of hell and on toward paradise, you too are the guide of someone's journey.
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28. See the future
See your customer's future and soon they will flow towards it.
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29. Create and identify the path
Strong narrative + compelling design + smart architecture = customer success.
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30. Guide Benevolently
Guide benevolently and you will achieve longevity and reliability by staying true to your customer's trust.
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31. Strategically Reducing Customer Friction
At the strategic level, once you have successfully identified customer motivation and then sustained it by orchestrating a clear path to their desired future state, all that remains is to avoid friction along that path.
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32. Frictionless Emotional Messaging
Failing to provide a clear path and support for your customer's emotional being can create so much friction that their path is effectively blocked.
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33. Frictionless Analytical Messaging
Providing both emotional and analytical support for our customers resulted in success for everyone.
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34. Frictionless System Design
Reliability in the context of infrastructure is synonymous with simple.
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35. Managing and Validating Strategy Prior to Execution
In the context of strategic planning work, management emphasizes the critical necessity of validation - checking your strategy against reality to ensure it will work as expected.
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36. Validate Planning Through Historical Experience
Where experts are available who can bring deep experience to bear, strategy will end up more sound and dependable.
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37. Validating Strategy Through Analysis
Checking strategy against reality is an exercise in conversation.
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38. Validating Strategy Through Testing
Testing our assumptions about what our client's customers need is one sure way to remain humble and empathetic toward them.