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Custom built web sites
03 Jun 2010
At redstrand.com we mostly work on custom built web sites. All of our clients have needs that just don’t work well with an out of the box solution.
Typically they will get 60% – 80% of their requirements covered by the out of the box approach, which means that the other 20% - 40% would need to be developed in a custom manner and then “bolted on”.
Factors that influence the decision on whether to take the custom approach are:
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Cost: If you can get 100% of what you need without having to custom build anything then you should probably go with that, but once you are only getting 80% or less of the functionality you need, then the fully customised approach may start to make more financial sense. You also need to consider any ongoing license cost for an out of the box solution.
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Time: One of the potential advantages with an out of the box solution is that it should be up and running quite quickly, but if a lot of additional functionality needs to be added then the duration of a fully custom built web site project may be comparable.
That is not to say that a custom built web site always takes a long time to develop. At redstrand.com we have a set of “plug-in”, library code that we can re-use for each project, helping to reduce time and cost.
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Quality: With either approach you need to be sure that the end result actually works, particularly if your website has a complex feature such as a shopping cart or booking engine.
Redstrand.com have consistently delivered high quality results for our customers. We test at every stage of the development process to ensure a robust result. In our testing we use all of the most popular browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox and Safari). We also ensure that your site is fully compliant with W3C, the world wide web consortium .