KEY POINTS:
When web software developer Tony Murrow travels, he has three companions vying for his attention - Apple, Linux and Windows.
He's comfortable working across the three operating systems that occupy his two laptops, which he uses to run a suite of web development tools.
A veteran of the book publishing industry who built his first business website in 1995, Murrow says New Zealand web development is more sophisticated than ever thanks to use of flexible development languages and Web 2.0-type design.
But he claims business managers and owners are still daunted at the prospect of building an online presence; something that compelled him to write a book on the subject, one of the few tailored to the local internet scene.
At 128 pages Business Web is a quick read. The topic of search engine optimisation, a crucial component of how a website is flagged in search engine queries, gets a half page of coverage. The chapter on e-commerce is five-and-a-half pages long.
Murrow said he modelled the book on the 43-page English language usage guide Elements of Style, first published in 1918 by Cornell University professor William Strunk, and still a key reference for American journalists.
"It seemed to me I could spend hours telling them the basics but what they really needed was a simple guide," said Murrow.
The basics include creating snappy content, prototyping designs, finding a web host and allowing payments to be made through a website.
Murrow believes web development here can be expensive and risky, because of the country's "flat infrastructure" but, if well executed, can generate new business and increase productivity.
"We're so far away from our markets, the possibility of getting extra internet traffic, the incentive is there," he said.
"New Zealanders are working almost as long as the Japanese and employers are complaining about productivity. We need to get people more interested in their work but not trapped in technology."
Of local websites, internet auction site Trade Me was an example of good design and execution.
"It's a community site that makes money," he said, contrasting Trade Me with Telecom's online retail operation Ferrit. "Ferrit is focused on getting retailers onboard. Consumers aren't looking for a mall, they're looking for the best deal," he said.
"That's why Flying Pig failed. They thought the money was with the retailer. It's with the consumer."
Along with maturing web development, hosting of websites on the internet had also become affordable, especially for those who chose to host their websites in Asia and the United States, where shared hosting with two gigabytes of website capacity and two terabytes of web traffic could be bought for as little as US$10 ($13.55) a month.
Murrow has watched the rise of blogging closely but isn't an avid blog reader himself. "I'm not overly fussed by the thing," he said.
"It's great if you're Steve Jobs but you've got to have the personality and the consistency to support it."
The best blogs tended to be written by journalists, who were used to "communicating regularly at a high level".
Guardian Unlimited, the website of Britain's Guardian newspaper, was an example of a mainstream media organisation adapting well to the web. The BBC deserved credit for its ambitious move to digitise its vast archive of TV footage and deliver it via the internet. "It increases Britain's cultural cache tremendously."
While Murrow acknowledges the internet is "a battle for ideologies", he's not partisan when it comes to development frameworks or languages.
He's a big proponent of cascading style sheets - standards describing how "html" web documents should be displayed.
"Find a CSS guru, because the better the CSS on your website, the more opportunities you have for growing your web business," he writes in Business Web.
And the answer to good web development? Murrow has three.
"Have a business strategy for web development," he said.
Building a website was futile unless the business owners had a clear idea of what benefits web development would deliver.
Any web project should also have a "requirements list" associated with it so developers and their clients stay on the same page throughout the process.
"It seems simple but, if you can agree what the requirements are, you know what your commitments are."
Finally, planning for ongoing development and making sure the website was scaleable was crucial.
* Business Web is available now.
