dode wrote: > Apologies to those who find commercial talk offensive. This is however an > opportunity to get work for those in the web business or recommend anyone > who has provided a good service if you've dealt with the decent weboids. > > The company I work for currently has a seriously cheesy web site > (www.scfabs.com - which may be floating in the ether between where it was > and where I'm parking it until we move it again) and we are going to have > it redesigned complete with a couple of web app bells and whistles to > appeal to the punters.
::pins ears back:: I'm just about to start a web development business myself as it happens, with one of our main angles for selling ourselves being price- those involved are all youngish, and evil commies* to boot, so we don't have the big fancy standard of living to maintain that some of our competitors might. *</irony> What's the timescale this needs to be done in? We're still a little ways from having everything in place, we still need our own site + portfolio of freebies we're doing for a couple of people, legal stuff, and a hosting agreement. Seeing as how you're sorting out hosting yourself, the only actual stumbling block for us would be getting a contract sorted out, thought I can get together the capital to hire a lawyer in fairly short order if necessary. > Basically we'll be looking for some static html describing the company and > our facilities to get the punters in (happy robots), along with a simple > content management system to allow updates of news and simple case studies. > This all has to be maintained by someone with no interest in designing > pages - just uploading text into a database or into a set of files. How fancy fo you want the design to be? Text-only, or fancy and trendy and graphical? The only thing that we can't do that springs to mind is Flash, the commercial license for that costs a bloody fortune, but it doesn't sound like you need Flash anyways. > Just to > complicate matters we also want to give our customers the facility to fill > out enquiry forms, attach drawings or specs and have these sent to us, > ideally this would be booked into a database on the site and we can update > it as the enquiry progresses. Sounds perfectly doable. > If that isn't enough were also looking to > have the site updated daily from our (soon to be purchased) MRP II system > to allow customer to monitor work in progress status. The latter item is > something we will add later but provision has to be made for it. Hmm, I've never worked with MRP II, but as long as we can get a spec from somewhere interfacing with it shouldn't be a problem. > I'm looking for a portable'ish system preferably based on Java, php or > another technology that doesn't limit my choice of companies to host the > site. My (very quick) intial thoughts are PHP + some SQL or other (MySQL probably) for the database. But it's hard to say until there's a more detailed spec thrashed out. > Could anyone recommend a good, preferably reasonably priced web design > house which would also be able to develop and supply the simple web apps > noted below. I'd prefer a one stop shop and don't want a designer who will > buy in scripts then shrug when it all breaks. There's nothing there that we couldn't do. If you're at all interested, I'd be happy to meet up and discuss specs, do you a quote etc. -- Alistair Davidson Read my comic, Bizmatch! http://www.altgeek.org/lord_inh/comic/index.html "Disloyalty in a democracy is to stop asking questions." -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
