Web Reliability

I have been a web development agency owner for twenty years now, and have witnessed the numerous issues that can stand in the way of reliable web revenue. I have seen numerous solutions as well. I am fortunate to have an extremely broad and varied network of contacts in the web development industry that have generously shared their time, wisdom, and expertise with me. This Web Reliability Framework is a synthesis of what my team, my colleagues, and myself have learned over the years.

I remember being introduced to the Netscape Navigator web browser in 1995. It first came out in 1994. I began working on websites professionally in 1999, when I started my company, Solspace. I will likely look back on this experience years from now with a better perspective on how I made a tiny contribution to the evolution of the internet. I don't say that with arrogance but with humility, knowing my place in the scheme of things. As one human element in the overall flow of progress. What I have learned in those twenty years is captured here as plainly and coherently as I can manage to describe.

I am a philosopher by training. In fact, I was on a path towards becoming a professor. I got irresistibly distracted by the internet along the way. But I still carry with me a love for pondering the meta. I admire systemic thinking - ways of looking at big problems by breaking them into smaller constituent parts and understanding their relationships. The field of web development has become so complex and intricate, with internet activity more and more irrevocably tied to what it now means to be human. It's time for a comprehensive philosophic discipline to be developed in this field. Perhaps this Web Reliability Framework is a tiny part of what may ultimately emerge as the philosophy of web development.

I offer this framework to you humbly. The overarching framework I suggest is consistent with my years of experience working on the web, but I don’t assume that it is authoritative. There are surely other ways of looking at the whole picture of successful websites, but this system, I find, holds water in practice.

What you will read in this book is an explanation of, and then further deconstruction of the 3 x 3 framework of Web Reliability. Once we get past the nine intersecting principles, we drift deeper into the territory of my subjective opinion. I break each of the nine cells of the framework into their own three component parts, as I see them. These parts may look peculiar to you, or they may resonate. I don’t know. What I can say is that they are authentically and completely based on my own experience of how to optimize the system. They are based on my own unique and personal way of running a web reliability company. Your experiences, your subjective view of these component pieces, will certainly not be exactly the same. But they should resonate. I believe that the framework as a whole effectively creates a sort of scaffolding that can support important conversations about how to optimize a web property’s ability to reliably generate revenue - to support your company’s success.

I hope it serves you well.