Closer To The Ideal

We seek to work with entrepreneurs who are launching web-based startups and whose initial startup budget is between $10,000 and $100,000. Ideally, the entrepreneur(s) lives on the east coast of the United States (as we ourselves do) since proximity would help us meet in-person. (Distance would drive up travel costs, and while we love a good road trip, a lot of trips would end up affecting the project’s budget.)

Over the last 3 years, people on our team have helped launch sites such as The Second Road, Monkeyclaus, Accumulist, Danforth Diamond and iHanuman.

The last few projects we’ve taken on have initially ranged in price from $40,000 to $80,000. As these are ongoing projects, I imagine their total costs will eventually be much higher.

The technologies we’ve developed for our clients include:

1.) Ajax based chat rooms for The Second Road. These have some unique features, including their permanence and unique URLs for each post to the chat rooms. The permanent URLs are an idea we borrowed from 37 Signals Campfire product, which is probably the best chat room service on the market. The accessibilty of past transcripts is meant to foster group identity and evolution over time.

2.) Ecommerce for digital products on iHanuamn. This system, built from scratch, allows the staff at iHanuman to enter videos and MP3s into the dataase, which then become available to iHanuman’s customers. The products are grouped into “albums”, allowing the yoga teachers to group together teachings that they feel must be taught as one connected course.

3.) Aggregation and syndication of RSS and Atom feeds. Bluewall uses some PHP scripts we developed, which tap into the functionality of such services as Yahoo Pipes, so as to offer custom aggregation services to people with an acute need for large quantities of high quality information on specific topics. We worked with Vijith Assar on this project. He is something of a Yahoo Pipes specialist, and we recommend him for that.

4.) WordPress customization. For sites such as the The Second Road blogs or Art Of The Possible, we pull together the 3rd party WordPress plugins that we determine our clients need, and also modify them as required to acheive the client’s goals.

5.) Social online networking. For The Second Road site, we created ways for members to sign up and create profile pages, link to friends, and share their stories with others (or they can keep a private journal that no else can see).

We do not take on projects that we estimate to be less than $10,000, as such projects merely require the simple production of standard web elements, a task we’ve no special competitive advantage at doing. For projects that cost less than $10,000, we suggest you contact Charmed Works, which is a highly competant web design company.

For very large corporate contracts, you might want to contact Huge, which is in New York City (Brooklyn). We have a close friend (and previous co-worker) who works there and who tells us that Huge is a leader in innovative techniques for keeping large scale projects organized.

Many times, clients who are new to the web are puzzled why the work is so expensive. We do what we can to educate our clients about the costs involved in this work. However, we also suggest that anyone who wants to work with us should get multiple bids. We recommend that you talk to Category4, the most successful web design company in central Virginia. We’ve also worked with Greg Herrington, who is an extremely talented computer programmer, with his own consulting business. We’ve also worked with Chris Clarke, who has done fantastic work on a number of large, complicated web sites. For design, we strongly suggest you talk to Darren Hoyt, who is one of the best designers in the world. You owe it to yourself to talk to all of them.

In the past we confined our activity to programming and design, but we were frustrated to see good ideas fail because our clients either had no quality content, or they had no strategy for promoting the good quality content that they had. More recently, we’ve begun lining up writers and videographers to produce content for sites, and, where the client needs help, we’ve begun to manage the promotion of the content online. We live and breathe the web, so our clients can focus on the other aspects of their business.

We strongly advise an incremental approach to web development. The best way to control a project’s costs is to build in phases. Each phase needs to be planned, and the plan must then be followed. Too much creative brain-storming, while a site is in the middle of construction, can lead to fantastic cost overruns. We have had clients who started off with ambitious schemes which, once launched, required more management resources than the client had to give, thus leading them to scale back. We advocate the opposite approach: start small and then scale up. These remarks are especially relevant for clients who may not have a depth of experience on the web.

In the past we’ve worked with both the PHP and Ruby computer languages, but in the future we hope to mostly use Ruby On Rails, as it is an innately superior technology. Many of the tasks that we labor to make functional in PHP are handled for us automatically in Ruby On Rails. We currently use Ruby on the backend for the scripts that automate tasks on our webserver. However, we recognize that each site is unique and requires a different mix of technologies. Whether your site needs HTML, Flash, CSS, Javascript, Ajax, Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, MySql, MS Access, MS SQL Server, Quicktime or more, we can find the people who have the skills you need. With our vast network of professional ties, we stand ready to pull together the designers, programmers, writers, videographers, animatiors, photographers, illustrators, marketers, office managers, project managers and other supporting staff who can make your project a success. We’ve had success with quick-forming agile teams that mobilize to get your website out to its target audience.