This site cost $18m to make
preview.fourseasons.com
preview.fourseasons.com
The costly part is the "Management" which creates the bureaucracy so other people can hang out in the project controlling excel tables while those 20 bastards work their asses off.
The site is snappy, visually impressive and with a well thought out user experience, tasteful upsell and in general clear communication.
At least it launched and managed to avoid all the pitfalls of corporate politics leading to bad architectural choices leading to a very expensive and poor implementation, which is a much more difficult challenge by itself than most people realize.
It's important to remember that:
* very few great developers/designers will work for Four Seasons on the cheap.
* it'll mostly have been well paid consultants earning $100/hr and up
* it is very likely that the project has had multiple iterations to reach it's current state, all hidden behind a single big release.
Seriously now, what is it, 1999?
The intersection of "people who deactivate JS" and "The addressable market of Four Seasons Hotels" is likely small enough that the lost potential sales wouldn't even cover the cost of development.
And i dont think that money was an issue in this project.
I think it makes sense that high-value employees with access to sensitive information get basic cybersecurity education. Therefore, some of them block JavaScript.
In no other industry do consumers get that kind of luxury. It'd be like the music industry putting new releases on cassette tapes for the people who haven't upgraded to CD or MP3 yet.
They have their own in-house development team. I can bet you we've not come anywhere close to that and the site is absolutely HUGE.
I suspect somewhere someone was given this as a budget and they had to spend it, or lose it.
Compared to the Four Seasons outsource model where anyone can say "I want that feature" and will be told "Sure, it'll cost an extra $1m of someone else's money".
That's a lot. And even so, my only two experiences at luxury hotels meant no wifi available in the room. And daily paid ethernet. I understand being there meant me or my company have money but I'd like to stop being ripped off after paying so much to stay there.
How do you overcome that in an online booking? I don't think they did, but how would you approach it?
Incoherent, produced-by-committee specs that don't actually have any explanation about how the soup of buttons and buzzwords is supposed to work, ridiculous management overhead.. it's probably not even the developers getting paid that much. Nobody walked off with that money, it was pissed away in 6-hour meetings.
$18mill should buy some pretty damn good proof readers, no?
You’d probably spend 6 months alone on producing the various specifications and plans, and deal with governance (reviews and revisions, sign-off, acceptance and so on). You’d build out a proper information architecture (a little more than the average SharePoint TeamSite taxonomy).
To show you how realistic that number is, consider the scale of documentation Four Seasons would require you produce. Those docs would probably include, but not be limited to:
Project/team structure
Risk assessment
Vision/Scope
Business requirements
User requirements
System requirements
Operational requirements
Usage scenarios
Conceptual design
Logical design
Physical design
Availability plan
Backup and recovery plan
Budget plan
Capacity plan
Communications plan
Deployment plan
Development plan
End user support plan
Project plan
Project schedule
Pilot plan
Purchasing and facilities plan
Security plan
Support plan
Test plan
Training plan
And after all that you haven’t even written a line of code (other than the inevitable throw-away proofs of concept and demonstrators).
Imagine having to estimate the effort required to produce that set. The analysis alone will take a herd of business analysts months.
Like Steve Sinofsky said – new businesses (start-ups), or even new markets, simply cannot solve the class of problems that is addressed by larger and more established firms.
[Edit] That list up there excludes systems integration (hotel reservations, customer care, etc) and data migration - both of which can add orders of magnitude to a project.
Unless your metaphor is more about the legitimacy of our profession. If that is the case, I'd point out that we have no inside knowledge on the situation, and then I'd use Four Seasons as a counterpoint -- they charge crazy rates for a fancy hotel room, yet they're not destroying the hotel industry.
[that's sarcasm of course]
But still.. that's some serious money thrown away.
The CQ Platform gives you a ton of these graphical widgets and social interaction out of the box, though there is still plenty of development to write a full reservation system. It also handle mobile rendering, site templating, and multiple languages quite well.
So while it sounds like people are seeing "a single website for $18m", I'd be willing to wager that was the cost for the entire content platform (CMS/Social/Mailings/Reservation system. So now they would have access to very advanced templating design, multi-lingual components.
The amount of time it would take them to roll out multiple country and language sites would be dwarfed in comparison to any other platform. That $18m may be a big upfront costs, but might well pay for itself if they intend to use for other properties and across multiple regions/languages.
Completely unrelated, does MJK mean anything to you?
Perhaps the developers were smart and made a value proposition rather than a pure hourly / salary proposition. Others on HN have talked about this distinction extensively, so try to avoid that little mental roadblock when considering the amount that they paid for the redesign.
I work(ed) for more than one company that uses this strategy. The whole idea is to get everyone to think that you are bigger than you really are.
Of course one can spend 18M on a bad project, but you guys covered it already...
They could do a better job of graceful degradation for javascript disabled without much effort, but I wouldn't blame them - everyone here seems to support the opposing mindset too.
The small font size and traditional 'luxury hotel' look of the header/footer really ruin it for me (example look how the tagline in the tiny logo is almost unreadable). Where they succeed (mostly) is in the page content layout and design.
Also, shrinking my browser window doesn't dynamically resize or shift the layout so -1 for unresponsiveness. I was on a sub page of the Boston location which may not have that flexibility but for 18M and 2012 ... it should.
Responsive design also limits design/ux decisions especially on their content pages which have a non-linear grid system and shouldn't be universal. I'm not for or against responsive web design but I think it should be contextual. I haven't seen many sites that have won me over.
I know that Host was doing work for Bank West. Anyone knows if they also did this as well or are they just above the line for this client?
This must be a "marketing" driven site where "good ideas" trump usability. I'm sure they got an award or three for this cutting edge design.
The price is not really something we can judge: it could be either fair or too much. Who knows, this may be a very flexible framework they'll use for the next X years (good) or a hard to maintain website which will cost them even more to keep alive.
We can't really judge.
I wish I had 18 Millions to develop mine. Or maybe not, I'm happy with scarce resources, so little goes wasted.
You write a spec sheet, bid low. You want to win the bid. Say 6 mil, maybe even 5. Then half way through the project, say you need another 3 mil to finish, and without that you can't finish it. Sunk costs? don't worry, the flip rate on staff means the sunk costs were the last guys problem.
Continue asking for more until you can't squeeze any more juice out of the orange that is your client. Congratulations, you just won at corporate politics. Ship whatever you've done and say it's the best you could do. Done.
Given the budgets here it seems we should have a MP as minister for NHS IT systems.
- It's hosted on AWS
- Their CDN is cloudfront
- 2 elastic AWS loadbalancers
- Apache webserver, probably with Tomcat
- Java session id in cookie
I assumed the site would have been either a Java or .Net site. I would have done it for $12 million ;)
It's slow, often times out, randomly doesn't work. The four seasons may have over paid for their site, but it's incredibly nice.
I don't understand that thing nerds do where they brag about how they could have done it in a weekend for $15 and some Mountain Dew. Well, I do understand it ("look how smart I am"), but it's still obnoxious.
$18M over 24 months is only $750K per month burn rate. At the typical agency rate of $150/hr, this is 35 people working on this project. Only 2 of them are developers. :)