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 :-) -- Casey Dougall Web Applications Developer Ph: 518 743-9424 Fax: 743-0337 Mannix Marketing Inc. 33 Park St. Third Floor, Glens Falls, New York 12801 http://Albany.com | http://Saratoga.com | http://LakeGeorge.com | http://Adirondack.net ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| 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:258206 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
