The Winchester Mystery House of Web Design

Perhaps you know the story of the Winchester Mystery House.

Mrs. Winchester, wife of the president of Winchester Arms, manufacturer of "the gun that won the west", lost her 6 year old daughter and husband within a couple of years and was devastated. Moving from Connecticut to San Jose, she listened to a Boston psychic who told her that the spirits of those killed by Winchester firearms were to blame for the deaths of her loved ones, and she must appease them or she would be next.

How to appease them? By building a house to their specifications, and continue building every day, 365 days a year, ceasing construction on the day she died. Mrs. Winchester hired a professional decorator for only one room, an unused ballroom, and designed the rest herself, working in her love of the number 13 and spider webs in to the design of the house.

Visitors to this popular roadside attraction will find doors that open up into walls, staircases that don't go anywhere, and windows with no view.

At least, that was my report from my "proto-travel-blog" circa 1997.

I was reminded of the Winchester Mystery House the other day during a conversation with a client. He was still putting together his content and asked me if he should give us copy and photos as he got them and we would just build out the parts of the site we had content for.

I told him "this ain't no Winchester Mystery House!" Luckily, he got the reference and even more luckily he wasn't insulted.

What I meant, and what he understood, is that you need a plan to develop an effective Web site. You can't just start building something, then add a little over here, then something over there, and expect it to help you build your business. Unless of course it's a blog. ;-)   

Every decent Web shop has it's own process for developing an effective Web site. For us it goes something like this:

• Work out the scope
• Develop a site outline and create a Content Intake Packet
• Create wireframes (Information Architecture)
• Design (and refine) templates
• Build out working prototypes of the pages
• Add backend programming
• Develop the rest of the site
• Review and test components
• Launch

Not every project contains all of these bullet points, and some projects have other bullets, such as SEO, email marketing or blogging. Regardless, we (flyte and the client) design the plan before executing it. That way we don't get any doors that open up into walls (non-working forms), staircases that don't go anywhere (broken links), or windows with no view (pages without purpose.)

Some Winchester Links:

• The Official Winchester Mystery House Web site (no mention of the ghost story, though)
• Satellite View, courtesy of Google Maps
• My trip to the Winchester House as reported in Roadtrip '97

Rich Brooks
Flyte Mystery House