There is a major disconnect between what people think they know, and reality. People think that websites and web development are really easy. Heck, even elementary school kids build websites. As far as it goes that is true. Putting together a simple web presence IS easy, you can quickly learn enough basic HTML to build a 'Hello World' website, and there are lots of online tools that help you gussy up the appearance.

 

The problems come when you want to get that website to actually do something. And then things start to get interesting - but not in a nice way. The new web developer has had two main choices: they can try and use a Template-system created by someone else, and try to squish their business into that model - think WordPress - or they can start scripting in PHP (or the equivalent) from scratch and try to build their own solution.

 

How difficult can coding your own business website in PHP be? A trivial task, you might think. After all, you can pick-up PHP in a week-end and there are endless free tutorials on the web showing you how-to. However, it turns out that it is awfully, incredibly, mind-numbingly difficult to produce secure, stable, maintainable commercial quality business websites. And that is why you don’t see large numbers of SMBs taking advantage of the Internet in the same way that Enterprises have done. Now, ‘hard to do’ means ‘expensive to solve’: not impossible, but eye-wateringly expensive, because competent programmers are in very short supply and so are costly to hire.

 

The other issue - the elephant in the room - is that the SMB market is simply not sexy. SMBs might be the driving force of the national economy, employing most people and creating the most wealth, but they are not sexy at all. No script-kiddie wants to waste their time working with business - which they don’t understand - when they could be developing a new iPhone app or geo-location widget to the latest wet tee-shirt contest.

 

So the very large but unglamorous SMB market has a huge unfulfilled need: how to create business grade websites and applications. There is a solution, and that is to use a codeless web development system. That is a software package that somehow wraps up all the difficulties and enables business users to side step the programming issue, and still create the unique custom solution they need.

 

The 90% - 10% rule bites: again and again

The problem has been that it turns out to be even harder to create a comprehensive codeless web development platform than it is to create the most complex of business websites. There have been a number of attempts, from Alpha5 to Wavemaker to, most recently, Adobe’s ‘Codename Muse’. And none have been successful because they fall foul of one of the oldest laws of any development project: the 90% - 10% rule. Everyone is familiar with the 90% - 10% rule. Simply stated that for any human endeavor you can get 90% of the way there in 10% of the time, but it will take 90% of the time to finish the last 10%. Completing that last 10% consumes so much time, and so many resources that projects never get completed, or fall short of what is required.

 

Attempts to create codeless web development systems have always failed at the 90% mark.

Previous approaches would go codeless 90% of the way, and then leave the site builder to code the last 10% themselves. Naturally, that is almost pointless: if the site owner were capable of programming the last - hardest 10% - then they would be capable of coding the 90% of the easy stuff.

 

Another major issue is that software developers generally have very little real-world business experience. The developers simply do not have the knowledge of how businesses actually work to be able to create realistic solutions for the SMB user. The SMB market is simply not sexy enough for most developers to care about, so solutions get created for the developer’s convenience rather than the business’s need. The net result is that these codeless systems never fulfil their potential and stop short, leaving the last - vital - 10% undone.

 

100% of what 90% of users need
A better solution would be to turn the 90%-10% rule on its head, and provide 100% of what 90% of users need. With this approach the codeless web developer would look at the needs of a very wide range of small and medium sized businesses and provide a flexible solution that does everything that is needed by nearly every company nearly all of the time. That way nearly all businesses would benefit immediately.

 

'clearString' solves the problem
‘clearString’ has been launched by Connecticut based independent software developer Enstar, to solve this problem. clearString combines twenty years’ company knowledge of creating SMB solutions with state-of-the-art development and deployment technology. clearString is a comprehensive software solution that enables any SMB to make effective use of web technology to streamline their business processes without having to ‘fall back’ onto programming or coding.