Sustainable/Open Business

For many years, we've organized our development around user stories. What exactly is each user trying to accomplish, and what does that look like when they try to accomplish those tasks?

Another sales call today, with a prospective start-upper who thought Drupal might lower his costs to get a web startup launched.

We recently had a new client contact us and ask if we could move their sites over to Pantheon so they could do some in-house development work. Of course we can do that for you!

A month or so ago, this question came up in a

Previously we learned why a custom web site is not a car. But it is a lot like a building.

"Make me a building. How much is it going to cost?"

"My budget is really tight, can you get the project started and show me what to do to finish it?" -- Yet another request from several different prospective customers.

"I just want a web site to do memberships, events, and e-commerce. How come you can't tell me how much it's going to cost? I just want to know the price, like when I buy a car."

I've long been a Bitcoin skeptic, not necessarily seeing the point of it. While I've kept passing tabs on its progress, I did not think it was viable, or worth much beyond pure speculative game play, a forum for making bets that today are up quite a lot.

Clients love fixed-price projects, because they have transferred the risk of the unknowns to the vendor. Even so, if the vendor cannot fully handle those risks, the entire project might fail.

Ask any contractor the most economical way to get a job done, and the answer will be "Time and materials." The reason? You are taking on all the project risk.

It goes something like this:

(Client): I want to add a shopping cart to my site. I heard that xyz cart is free, can you add that for me?

(Developer): Sure! That looks easy.

Whether you realize it or not, you're doing CRM already. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot buzzword that all kinds of businesses desperately want.