Hi, Casey, and thanks for the feedback. You're right...it is hard to compete against the cookie-cutters. I've done pretty well mostly because of people's ignorance around here of how the web, especially websites, work and how to make them work for their businesses.
And people here, too, like to be able to look someone in the eye when they talk business. A lot of what I do is consulting, which is a service I offer to educate the customer on what they need, in the hope that I'll be the one meeting that need. It's paid off...I've had very few turn down my proposals, even though they almost always say, "that's quite a bit higher than I thought it would be..." I'm starting to package SEO/SEM work with design and development, too. Clients are demanding it...they know they have to show up in the search engines. You're right about the functionality of sites...it's very similar across sites... announcements, calendar, photo gallery, web links...those are ripe for plug-n-play coding. I'd like to know more about what you mean by this: " We flush the above things out to their individual portals as static content. Meaning cfftp much of the time, well events are an xml feed but the point is, there is very little overhead on the server because once they "publish" it's gone!" Nothing database driven in that setup, huh? How do you get the content to send to the sites? Do you enter it in xml pages yourself and have that same info used on a variety of sites? Is the information custom for each site? (Perhaps it's time to learn XML...never could find a use for it...perhaps this is it) CF 7...perhaps when we enter into the window of "buy CF 7 now, and get a *free* upgrade to CF 8...I don't want to pay $1300 now and another $600 in less than a year. And I like running my own server too much to go back to contracting out that function...used to do it...not too bad, but now I've got total control over the server. But it is time to come out of the stone age... Rick -----Original Message----- From: Casey Dougall [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 8:59 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: Constructing multi-user/multi-site applications... Hi Rick, I would say it's hard being a private developer in todays age. If it wasn't for additional services Mannix Marketing provides like SEO and of course link packages on our travel portals, I don't think Sara "the boss" would have had the same type of luck staying a float in this cookie cutter website world we live in. Now if your market is super nich, you can be hurting yourself attempting to compete against these larger players. For the most part if the person doesn't have a website by now, they actually don't know much about the internet as a whole. Not saying they don't surf and check e-mail, but they don't understand why a project with someone like you or me creating custom websites cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, when they see big players like that company you mentioned offering them the cookie cutter for much much less. Time to play up the advantage of your designs against the cookie cutters, it's also time to condense the applications you can into a central admin area, and I'll tell you why. When you get down to it, most clients need a handful of dynamic applications on their website. We see the same ones time and time again. - Content Management - Maybe 4 - 10 pages which actually get updated on a regular basis. - Event Management - Yup, some type of list of events, when where, who etc.. - Photo Gallery - Flash gallery that rotates though pictures on our website!!! We here that about every day. - Web Links Mgnt - Not that our clients ask for this often but, our SEO team does. You need at least one page on your site you can post links to other websites revolving around your business. There are a few more but you can see the trend here. You build similar applications across multiple websites. Why re-build them from scratch or even use a template each time when you can house the admin are of these applications centrally, continue to evolve each app. and cut down on the development time for each website. We flush the above things out to their individual portals as static content. Meaning cfftp much of the time, well events are an xml feed but the point is, there is very little overhead on the server because once they "publish" it's gone! You might have similar applications that you can do this with. In the end, most of our clients don't need coldfusion. We need it because we like coding our apps with it, but once the client clicks publish, bam static content living on their site that is seo friendly and no overhead. I guess in the end, I'm saying centralize when you can, that doesn't mean you won't have your 100% custom websites even though they could use some of the above applications but at lease you can then focus more on the template/design aspect and less time on code. You also need to at least get a shared host with cf7 :-) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:258211 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
