Looking around London and most other cities, skyscrapers are everywhere, out of necessity, due to the race for space. So the end result for this competition for land is often elegant structures with solid foundations, designed to last, designed to cater for many people. A perfect analogy (in my mind) for how to explain intangible websites.

There has been much discussion on the subject of scaling websites, something becoming increasingly relevant with the advent of sites such as digg.com, stumbleupon.com, delicious.com that allow small sites to rapidly shoot to success with relative ease.

The social web is exploding, causing sites that embrace sharing, entity connections, open services etc. to take scaling seriously. Scaling is the art of ensuring your service/website will remain performant and available to every user and consumer service. This article, however, is not about scaling, but it is a look at the differences of skyscraper sites vs. personal blog’s and company brochureware sites (studio sites).

Background on Skyscraper sites

Creating components of a skyscraper website takes a huge amount of time, money and resourcing. A component may come in the form of an article page, widget or homepage redesign and may take months to reach a production ready state. There is a good reason for this inefficiency and it comes from enterprise organisation traits. Building sites to serve millions of users has taken much inspiration from the traditional enterprise software world through having to be agile, organised and technically superior from the competition.

For most departments or domains within these huge website companies you will find a vast array of employee positions. A typical website or service within the skyscraper organisation would consist of the following roles:

• Product Manager
• Program Manager
• Engineer
• Web Developer
• Architect
• Quality and Assurance

There are many more intricacies behind this setup which could include additional roles such as database experts, infrastructure, security, SEO, process etc. but for engineering and demonstration purposes, this model will be sufficiently accurate.

If you take a step back you can tell that involving this many people for every product will inherently incur inefficiencies over a single all-round developer. There is good reason for this setup, though; every member of the team will be highly skilled and recognised in their field of expertise, leading to world class teams. World class teams create world class results, something that world class companies demand to stay competitive.

What constitutes a skyscraper site?

We are talking about the sites you should all be familiar with: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, MSN, Amazon, Wikipedia. Sites with reach to hundreds of millions of users every week.

The Joys of building skyscraper sites

Building large sites is for the most part a privilege, something to aspire to if you are involved in any way in developing websites or software. Here are just some of the highlights of working for one of these large sites:

• Audience reach
• Cutting edge technologies and techniques
• Team of elite colleagues
• Great prestige

Pain points

Building websites with so much public exposure can bring pitfalls in working on these sites including:

• Politics involved at most stages of development
• Slow turnaround in projects through the vast considerations in delivery
• Narrow range of expertise exercised

The studio site

This is the site you go to to find information in a specific domain, a company, service, product, place or person, for instance. These sites are usually served to at most a few thousand users per month. You will normally find studio sites being produced by web agencies or individuals.

The love for developing studio sites

Studio scale sites can be really enjoyable to develop. Here are just some of the plus points:

• Quick turn around in developing websites
• Overall control over the site(s)
• Ability to diversify skill sets and projects

Downsides to working on studio sites

Generally speaking it is hard to flaw working on studio sites. You have the ability to move away from what does not work for you, they are usually quick to complete and once a development framework has been established you can reap the rewards of efficiency and concentrate on spending your time on new initiatives. Issues can arise when working for small, dynamic, young agencies where clients could be pestering and site design requests can be annoyingly denting for your portfolio.

Respect to the Skyscraper Organisations

Building large scale websites is a joy. For myself the main experience has been working for the company itself. Yahoo! treats their staff amazingly. We are all encouraged to aspire to be better at what we do, to have an open attitude and simply enjoy what we do. Yahoo! is by no means the only great employer in the web sphere, Microsoft and Google among others are renowned for their employee development, appreciation and respect. Probably one of the driving forces towards creating world renowned and respected websites is through their number one assets, their employees.

In Summary

If you are in the business of building websites and you are not happy with what you are doing consider the flip side industry of your work, for example, if you build skyscraper sites, consider working for an agency to gather more freedom and control in developing studio sites.

So, if you are observing skyscraper sites wondering why it takes them so long to release products, think for a minute that they may just be frantic behind the scenes trying to ensure they release a secure, pleasing, rock-solid world class website.

On 12th September Yahoo! opened their Sunnyvale, California offices to a group of around 250 developers, or hackers, if you will in the name of Hackday. This year we had a big focus on Yahoo!s current direction, open, summarised by the preferred term ‘Yahoo! Open Strategy‘ (YOS). I was lucky enough to be invited this year to help out with the event organisation and to do some hacking myself on the YOS front.

YOS claims to be what will take Yahoo! forward and lead them to be a stronger ‘starting point’ for many users, a good call but success will be a test of offerings and time to market.

YOS consists of a number of components, architected to be loosely coupled meaning that we (as developers) should be able to jump in and out of services without having to learn an entire new platform. Some of the exciting developments from YOS will include;

• YQL – a web service with an SQL-like syntax with the possibility to post process query results with a Unix esq pipe structure, designed to easily expose various data sources.
• YML – a set of XML helper tags that when embedded in the HTML of applications will be replaced with common interface elements and populated data. An example of this would include a direct message form for instance.
• Application Platform – allowing creation of a self hosted application. Additionally, you will be able to serve a cached static ‘mini’ version of the created application that would be found in such areas as a sidebar on a Yahoo! media property such as News.
• OpenID – authentication system
• Open Social capabilities, yay for open standards!
• New profile pages, new look and feel, at last, the other ones have been a royal mess.

Open Social provides me with a huge sense of excitement, this is where we start drilling down further into the iceberg of the Internet, discovering the stupendous amounts of possibilities that the intangible web fruits for us.

Apologies for my eternal optimism and enthusiasm creeping into this piece, but really its there, this hackday, hack potential was proven time and again. A great example of the advances we witnessed from the submissions was an application built into Yahoo! Mail that would scan your emails and attempt to automatically extract details of an upcoming trips, leading on to generate a personalised itinerary using the service Tripit, how cool would that be, as someone with poor organisational skills, such as myself at times, this would be invaluable.

All in all, Hackday was awesome, it was good to see developers were keen to use tools built by the company i work for and thus take for granted. Bad stuff, yea well that would be with my hack, i didn’t manage to complete anything, instead i just played around with all the tools creating ‘hello world’ apps.

• Cathy Ma
• Cyril Doussin
• Ben Ward
• Christian Heilmann
• Steve Marshall
• Marco van Hylckama Vlieg
• Tom Hughes-Croucher
• Steve Webster
• Neil Crosby
• Rajat Pandit
• Mike West
• Dirk Ginader
• Benjamin Hawkes Lewis
• Klaus Komenda
• Mike Davies
• Tim Huegdon
• Mark Norman Francis

A few notable ex-Yahoo! developer blogs include:

• Stuart Colville
• Ed Elliot
• David Dorward
• Lawrence Carvalho
• Simon Jobling