Since I last wrote, the business plan for my entrepreneurship subject has been completed but mainly Brad and I have been focusing on developing the specification for the website. We've decided to outsource the development of the actual website as the more global economy that we live in now makes it easy to access skilled resources from all parts of the world. Through websites like rentacoder.com and freelancer.com, you can post details for a particular project and have individuals and companies from all over the world bid the price that they will do the work for. We know of a few people that have successfully used these types of services with great success.

Apart from the likely low cost, another reason for outsourcing the development is that it seems as though the best technologies to develop websites in these days are open-source languages (ie Php and MySQL). That is if you want a fast website - which we definitely do. The problem with this is that neither Brad nor I have experience developing in these technologies.

Another reason to outsource is that I believe that once the service is up and running, our time will be better spent promoting usage, providing customer service, and generally running and growing the business. If we were to do the development ourselves, we risk forever being stuck doing improvements and ironing out bugs, rather than working on the business.

But in order to outsource, we need a very thorough specification document. I had already prepared a first draft of the interface using Powerpoint, but I'm now revising this based on a few extra ideas. Brad is preparing a separate document which details the database structure and describes the functions in detail. It's quite an iterative process because a change to the interface usually requires changes to the data structure and functionality document, but also, as we think through the functionality further, it often means changes to the interface as well. Sometimes these are fairly straightforward alterations, but often they require a lengthy discussion before we can be sure we're taking the right approach. Thank god for MSN Messenger!