Web Development: How to deal with sudden hypes and fads

Hypes in Web Development go out of style as fast as new celebrities go out in the music and celebrity industries. Today, we will help you deal with them.

Fads And Hypes: Or why the clients jump on them

It’s human nature to consider what is new that is better. Everything unknown, everything that sparks our curiosity, adds a little excitement when perceiving that new idea. Most of the clients being uninformed on the products that they want to use, have no idea that in the software industry in general, something new almost always means instability, incompatibility, and dread for the one building upon them with the headache of dealing with something that is not yet correctly documented, and released fresh out of the oven,without any pillows to fall on in case of failure.

Let us explain the big reason why it might be a total mess to jump on new hypes quickly,and they are:

No Market Value Yet.

We need to take care of the market share of a web development product, such as WordPress, so we can assure ourselves that there will be always developers and managers for it available. A product that didn’t gain any important market share yet gives developers no reason at all to take up on it, or not even a sign of becoming the norm, like Yii did in 2010.I am not mentioning here that a new product might be useless or not good for development (see the new JavaScript fameworks, they all turned out to be awesome!) but it is wise always to be cautious about investing in something that doesn’t represent a value to the web development world yet.

Not stable yet.

If something suddenly caught on fire, suddenly, and you can ask any stock teller about this, is that it is unwise to jump on it immediately, because it has not proven it’s stability yet. You don’t want to end up using a product for your new website that won’t be updated again because the fad died. We do not want to encourage the “what is old and proven is always better” thinking,as looking to the future is always good, but we rather want to say that you should use a  reliable product for a reliable website. I do not want to see anymore people coming on the #ruby channel on Freenode IRC server, and complaining “but my Kohana website crashes from 10 to 10 minutes…”, keep your feet on the ground and don’t risk losing your visitors over something that is not fully functioning and stable yet.

So stay with your stable products and don’t immediately apply a product for your website unless you’ve got enough information on it’s popularity, degree of stability and functionality (I will recommend Zend for PHP Frameworks, and WordPress for CMS). They might not have the most cutting-edge feature yet, but you can count on these proven technologies that you’ll never experience errors that you are unable to debug, and risk to lose your loyal visitors for your website!