Consulting
Planning and Documentation
A word on documentation. In our minds planning and documentation is the most important part of a successful development project. Often, to save money or time developers or clients of developers will opt out of producing planing documentation with sufficient detail. This inevitably leads to deadline or budget problems down the line due to the lack of detail in the plan. No one would dare build a building or a home without planning it all out on paper first, and for the same reasons. Without a plan to go by, often things are done wrong, don’t meet goals or have to be done over and over again at the expense of budget and deadlines.
We get asked to build websites all the time. Which is good since that’s what we do. But more often than not, we get asked for a website, but what they really want is software. Let’s explain the difference: on the surface many websites look the same, text on a page, colors, pictures etc. So when does a website cross the line and become something more? Pretty much as soon as you want it to do something other than just be read by viewers. Like collect email addresses from users, sell something, catalog products, send out emails, Blogs, Content Management Systems, all of these things venture out of the realm of plain old HTML pages and step into the world of Applications. The reason for this division is because they all require software to make decisions based on what the user has done and what you want it to do when the user does this. These are usually referred to as Business Rules.
So why did we tell you all this? Because planning is important. If your website has to do stuff rather than just be there, we may suggest documenting it within an inch of it’s life. We promise it will save money later. And the best part is that just like you can take a good blue print to any builder worth his salt, you can take any development documentation to any developer worth his salt. These documents are your documents, they are your ideas, your vision and the road map to get there. We just help distill it all to something that makes sense to a code monkey.
Planing and Documentation Services:
- Discovery and requirements gathering
- Development, deployment and maintenance plans
- Functional requirements
- Prototyping
- Usability and user interface (UI)
- Disaster recovery plans
- Usability testing and use cases
- You are speaking a foreign language to me
Don’t worry, if none of this makes sense we can explain with examples. Give us a call.
Software Development
Okay, so there’s a lot of different types of web projects. Maybe you just need a simple shopping cart and a blog. No problem, we won’t force you to keep a diary about it. Some web applications are quick and easy. Shopping carts, blogs, forums, photo galleries and many other things can be accomplished with software off the shelf. This can be an enourmouse cost and time benifit. Most simple sites can be achieved with these packages without any sacrifice to form or function. Call us and we can show you how.
Now if you need something more specific, something special, we may make you keep a diary. We like to do these things by the project, so give us a call and we can talk about what you need. Here’s what we can do.
Development Services:
- PHP
- Javascript
- Actionscript
- Java
- Perl
- Bash
- Ruby
- MySQL
- Streaming video/audio
- Content Management Systems
- Shopping Carts
- Blogs
- Flash/Flex/AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)
We also have a secret desire for iPhone software development.
How to Proceed
We can work one of two ways. By the hour or by the project. If your project requires any commitment past a 4 weeks you may want to talk to us about a project price. Call or email us for more information.
Or
If you just want to buy a few hours to pick our brains, write a little code or otherwise provide expertise you can do that online by purchasing hours from us. Please contact us for this and we will set you up with an account and obtain billing information from you.