I have been doing a lot of work on justifying the cost of large scale web development and have read a number of interesting articles in the last few weeks. In fact I will be making this the subject of April’s article (click here to see previous Xebidy articles).

The reason for this post is a great idea that was put to me by Darrin Bird, who is a consultant Project Manager to base and Backpackers World. Darrin proposed that a tourism website project be considered in the context of a retail travel outlet. To set up a travel shop will cost in excess of $100k and require the work of consultants and marketers. Usually in a shop there is one person even commissioned with the role of marketing a shop. Yet, often tourism businesses view their website as a marketing product without the commensurate expenditure on the development – let alone the ongoing resource commitment. It will be great day for the quality of tourism websites when it is the norm to spend in excess of $100k on development in the first place and then resource the sites with the necessary marketing and content staff.

Simply thinking of the website as an online retailer that you control would also provide a simple measure of performance. The website should stack up on it’s own right financially. I don’t know what a retailer would be expected to return in terms of margin from their commission earnings – maybe 1 – 2%; but I would bet anything that a well developed, well resourced eCommerce website could deliver a much greater return on investment.

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