Montreal Tech Watch

Énergie has just relaunched its website, radioenergie.com. They wanted “web2.0″ features, so they added blogs, user profiles, conversations between radio DJs and the audience. They are obviously inspired by myspace and skyblog, Radio Skyrock’s blogging platform that dominates the social networking landscape in France.

But it seems they were just too ambitious. The only thing they got right was displaying advertisments. The website is unbelievably slow, throws Drupal/mySQL errors, and it looks like it has just been tested with internet explorer 5. I had a look at how they built the webpages, and it is a nightmare, even worse than myspace. It reminds me of my early days where I just inserted in a website “features” ie javascripts, CSS, snippets of code I found on the Internet, without knowing it would take a toll on the database and the overall user experience.

I know they announced it is just a BETA version, but I think that with a website like this, they will just turn off visitors.

This must be seen as a proof that even if facebook, flickr or skyblog has many cool features, it doesn’t mean that you could do the same too. It is just not a matter of getting the idea and installing the “ready-to-use” open source CMS you just found on sourceforge. You need to architect your website. You need the tech infrastructure to back it up. You need quality assurance. You need engineering to optimize your database queries. You need user interface specialists. This means you need to invest on key people and time. And in this case, you also need developers who talk with product designers and are not afraid to say that it is just not possible.

In RadioEnergie’s website, the only way they can pull it off is start over and build a custom solution.