Are All Uk Web Companies Crap?

[spyguy]

Bear with me on this.

A friend of a friend was after a simple web update. Rather than a static site, he wanted something sat on db and did some active stuff at the backend. It was not a webstore, just a web front end for gathering info and acting on it.

Bloke was having problems and asked for help.

Basically he wanted bootstrap UI (he pointed go a site he liked) and a web frsmework at the other end.

I went through his reqirements and we setyled on: bootstrap3, django, postgresql all running on a docker or container.

I did not think those requirements were too much of a hurdle. Jntil we got local web developers in for a chat. To a company they were all graphic designers who produce static, non dynamuc web site. None had any capacity to handle any form of development, or any ideas on how to test their websites.

Is it just me?

[spyguy]

Yep Local web developers are often repressed graphic designers, hoping to win an award for something beautifully useless

Much better to grab a codie mate with spare time...who'll knock you up something that works but looks ugly as feck

P

I specced bootstrap3 as its easy to make dimple clean websites. The company just wanted a clean gui.

I asked if they had any javascript developers. Only one company had one - a turk(i think) who was trying to learn.

One tried to bs that flash would do ffs!

Not a single company had anyone who could prog python ffs.

I was genuinely surprised. I thought stuff had moved on since 2004/IE /java browser apps.

[spunko2010]

Realistically they will need the help of 2 trades, a developer ('coder') and a web designer. It's rare to meet someone who works on code who can design a website that isn't ugly as sh1t, by the same token.

[DTMark]

With the rise of things like OpenCart and Magento, and competing with India, a whole industry now exists of supposed 'web companies' who claim to do it all, but in reality, want the customer to hand over 10k for them to take some templates off Template Monster, change the text and the logo, and upload it all for them.

In reality they have indeed supplied an e-commerce solution. The issue comes when something doesn't work properly or the customer wants something a little different. At which point it becomes obvious that said company is not capable of those thing precisely because they are not developers. If there is some sort of plug-in for whatever framework or package they used, then they can employ the same model and cut a profit for just installing it, but that is not bespoke development.

There are however some very good companies who are 'certified' with some of the technologies, like Magento, and this is where a huge gulf in price begins to develop especially if they have an expensive office in Central London.

As regards "India" the biggest issue I've seen is one of communication, where a customer wants to accomplish a specific set of things with a design. What they then get is the Template Monster approach again, or actually quite a nice design, but one that does not even consider the strategies or target customer. It's "just a nice design". Because said company does nice designs.

It is relatively unusual to find companies which have all the skill-sets in-house and generally it's best to pick one which focuses on the technologies you are interested in. I've never actually had a customer ask for specific technologies apart from Magento, which we don't do because we built our own kit so we can support it 100% and aren't left at the mercy of others' code.

However I was going to suggest you start by searching for e.g. "bootstrap3 +Django +postgresql +bespoke +web" and leave the word "design" out. But I just did that and I get absolutely nothing useful in the results. A search for "bootstrap3 +mysql +bespoke +web" returns far more..

[spyguy]

Realistically they will need the help of 2 trades, a developer ('coder') and a web designer. It's rare to meet someone who works on code who can design a website that isn't ugly as sh1t, by the same token.

I wasnt dxpecting to find a dingle person. Just thought the company would have a pet coder. They didnt. One did have herman miller chairs for its workers. That was stressed! And they did have have some fit women - wed have done ok on th pull, just not so great on the backend.

My experience has given me the idea to open up some time gor this sort of work.

[spyguy]

With the rise of things like OpenCart and Magento, and competing with India, a whole industry now exists of supposed 'web companies' who claim to do it all, but in reality, want the customer to hand over 10k for them to take some templates off Template Monster, change the text and the logo, and upload it all for them.In reality they have indeed supplied an e-commerce solution. The issue comes when something doesn't work properly or the customer wants something a little different. At which point it becomes obvious that said company is not capable of those thing precisely because they are not developers. If there is some sort of plug-in for whatever framework or package they used, then they can employ the same model and cut a profit for just installing it, but that is not bespoke development.There are however some very good companies who are 'certified' with some of the technologies, like Magento, and this is where a huge gulf in price begins to develop especially if they have an expensive office in Central London.As regards "India" the biggest issue I've seen is one of communication, where a customer wants to accomplish a specific set of things with a design. What they then get is the Template Monster approach again, or actually quite a nice design, but one that does not even consider the strategies or target customer. It's "just a nice design". Because said company does nice designs.It is relatively unusual to find companies which have all the skill-sets in-house and generally it's best to pick one which focuses on the technologies you are interested in. I've never actually had a customer ask for specific technologies apart from Magento, which we don't do because we built our own kit so we can support it 100% and aren't left at the mercy of others' code.However I was going to suggest you start by searching for e.g. "bootstrap3 +Django +postgresql +bespoke +web" and leave the word "design" out. But I just did that and I get absolutely nothing useful in the results. A search for "bootstrap3 +mysql +bespoke +web" returns far more..

Ive dxperience of india. Inherited an jndian team from a merger. 2 years they delivered fckall. Team of 20, cost 1/3 of the uk, delivered nothing.

Direct 2nd hand if indian business process outsourcing - forms, processes. Dire qa. Some id robbing and scams.

Friends company does not have time to deal with that level of crap. Constant indian coldcalls has put him off india.

Postgres is not optional. Might need postgis at later date.

[MrPin]

Your worms are all scrumbled!

[DTMark]

Ive dxperience of india. Inherited an jndian team from a merger. 2 years they delivered fckall. Team of 20, cost 1/3 of the uk, delivered nothing.

Direct 2nd hand if indian business process outsourcing - forms, processes. Dire qa. Some id robbing and scams.

Friends company does not have time to deal with that level of crap. Constant indian coldcalls has put him off india.

Postgres is not optional. Might need postgis at later date.

I honestly haven't heard mention of that software for years.

It might be the requirement that's hardest to track down developers for.. perhaps you can get some joy here:

https://www.postgresql.org/community/

[spyguy]

With containers making hosting an active website dirt cheap, lettingyou try out ideasand being zble to scale, I though there might be some companie servicing that market.

Its not hard. Python great and simple flask django are free for the picking. But, nope, nowt. Just graphic designers with aeron chairs.

Maybe cross thread for joe - graphic design web companies are full of hot women. Maybe late night brainstorming wit booze could change joes luck?

[MrPin]

What's wrong with Postgres? I used to work for Ingres once.

[spyguy]

I honestly haven't heard mention of that software for years.It might be the requirement that's hardest to track down developers for.. perhaps you can get some joy here:https://www.postgresql.org/community/

Postgresql is great.

Postgis is amazing.

All for the cost of .... 0£

Dont ignore the price point for trial sites. MS pricing is getting painful snd unpredictable.

[winkie]

Can someone please translate this thread.

[DTMark]

What's wrong with Postgres? I used to work for Ingres once.

Not saying there's anything wrong with it, simply that it isn't as widely supported as, say, Microsoft SQL Server.

In the same way that Wordpress "developers" are ten-a-penny but finding people who know an alternate CMS called "Drupal" is harder.

[spyguy]

What's wrong with Postgres? I used to work for Ingres once.

Ingres bracknell office was wifeswapping hotbed.

[MrPin]

Not saying there's anything wrong with it, simply that it isn't as widely supported as, say, Microsoft SQL Server.

In the same way that Wordpress "developers" are ten-a-penny but finding people who know an alternate CMS called "Drupal" is harder.

It's a relational database and it works for no money. Microsoft are having a laugh with their licensing costs. Good product, but empty your wallet. I don't like MySQL any more since Oracle got it. I am a crap web designer BTW, I generally do the other end.

[StainlessSteelCat]

I think you're better off finding a freelance developer. Nowadays most of the ones I've come across have enough design capability that the final result won't be pig ugly, just kinda functional.

[DTMark]

Postgresql is great.

Postgis is amazing.

All for the cost of .... 0£

Dont ignore the price point for trial sites. MS pricing is getting painful snd unpredictable.

Microsoft SQL Server is about £30 per month IIRC for the basic edition, double that for quad processors. It's nearly free.

That said, if your mate is proficient with the technologies, why not get a dedicated box and set up the database server on it himself (who is going to be supporting it going forward anyway?) - if it's just ANSI SQL then good schema design is good schema design regardless of what it's being deployed to.

That said, I've tried out the MySQL interface before and couldn't work out how to do stuff - it's not the SQL nor the underlying server, but the learning curve of the interface differences.

When you start with an enquiry that says "We want these technologies" a company should simply point you elsewhere if they do not do them, rather than say something like "We'll have a go.." which almost always ends very badly.

[spyguy]

I think you're better off finding a freelance developer. Nowadays most of the ones I've come across have enough design capability that the final result won't be pig ugly, just kinda functional.

There does not appear to be many local. Guy needs some hand holding and back+forth requirements.

[winkie]

My computer crashed for the second time.....can only expect a third time.....can anybody help me?

[spyguy]

Microsoft SQL Server is about £30 per month IIRC for the basic edition, double that for quad processors. It's nearly free.That said, if your mate is proficient with the technologies, why not get a dedicated box and set up the database server on it himself (who is going to be supporting it going forward anyway?) - if it's just ANSI SQL then good schema design is good schema design regardless of what it's being deployed to.That said, I've tried out the MySQL interface before and couldn't work out how to do stuff - it's not the SQL nor the underlying server, but the learning curve of the interface differences.When you start with an enquiry that says "We want these technologies" a company should simply point you elsewhere if they do not do them, rather than say something like "We'll have a go.." which almost always ends very badly.

Ahh but it needs to run on MS server os - dont trust linux port.

Containers are a mandatory requirement. Theres loading and scsling issues that may raise head down the line.

[spyguy]

My computer crashed for the second time.....can only expect a third time.....can anybody help me?

If its a laptop, shutdown and pull battery out.

[spyguy]

Your worms are all scrumbled!

No. I have a fat stylus and crap predictive text!

Why cant tablets come with a mini model m kybd?

[JoeDavola]

I've been writing software for about 10 years. For most of that I worked for a consultancy that had no real service offering/product so we were moved from one customer to another every couple of years. I've done windows app development, I've done enterprise level middleware, web services, business intelligence (reporting from relational DB's/denormalized schema design/automating data migrations), and lots of other weird and wonderful things. And of course I've done little bit of web work.

One of my colleagues had spent all of his career (like me, 10 years) in web development; he's up to speed on all the latest technologies as they come out and is currently setting up a hosting 'architecture' if that's the right word using docker. He's been telling me all about docker and it does indeed sound awesome.

A couple of years back we got a job with a client to develop a new website from scratch which covered both back office management of their business, some public access stuff and also about 3 other layers of access for members. In parallel with developing their site we took the work that we were doing and have moved much of it into a 'framework' that we'll use for any future clients - one simple example being that we wrote a little reporting tool, so that we can provide them with as many reports on their business data as they need, along with the ability to export in different formats (PDF/Excel ect...) without writing any extra code; we just write some SQL, do a bit of config, and the report appears on their Admin dashboard. The entire site has built in simple content management so the admins can change any text without needing to pay us.

I think with our combined experience of consultancy across lots of different project types, and decent web design skills, we would have been very useful to small/medium organizations, being able to make suggestions for ways they could use software (either custom written or as part of our configurable framework) to automate some business process or speed things up, but the problem with the people we did work with was money - they paid us 10 grand all in to start with, the project had a ton of scope creep, and they were pretty much expecting us to continue adding bits for no extra money 2 years after the project had started. How they expected to get a chunk of a developers time for over 2 years, for 5 grand is beyond me. What we wrote was a custom app that spans all sections of their business and allows them to manage the lot from one place, but they don't seem to realize how good value what they got was.

So the impression I've gotten as someone who is a member of a 2 man development team up for hire, is that the money doesn't seem to be there with regards to small businesses - maybe we're just talking to the wrong potential customers. If you're on the board of directors of a consultancy company that has managed to get on the approved supplier list for tendering to the public sector then you can charge as much £££ as you like, and even if you don't deliver you often still get to keep the money (I've seen this happen first hand), but for a small team with no contacts it felt like we were fighting to be paid for our time at all.

We liked the idea of a bridge between completely custom code and the 'endlessly configurable product' that has been so popular among big organizations over the last 10 years or so but never seems to quite deliver, and thought a framework to speed up web development and development of frequently used business 'tools' would do that.

But I think the money these days seem to be in software as a service, and getting places to pay licence costs, rather than pay to develop anything new.

I know what you mean about designers not knowing about the tech side of things, cause this is what the company we worked with had to deal with.

So that long winded response is my way of wandering whether the reason you can't find good developers is that maybe developers tend to work on projects that have much bigger budgets than someone can typically pay for their website?

Out of interest, in case my friend and I start to try and get more customers, how much were the Web design companies quoting you?

[JoeDavola]

A friend of a friend was after a simple web update. Rather than a static site, he wanted something sat on db and did some active stuff at the backend. It was not a webstore, just a web front end for gathering info and acting on it.

So are we talking just content management?

Or does 'gathering info and acting on it' mean an engine for setting up polls of some sort and then collecting the results of them? (it's one of the many things that we had on our list when were going to write a web framework that would try and provide an abstract version of various features that a business might want).

If it's not that complicated I'm assuming he can't just put a spec up on rentAcoder or whatever it's called and see what comes back?

[stormymonday_2011]

It's a relational database and it works for no money. Microsoft are having a laugh with their licensing costs. Good product, but empty your wallet. I don't like MySQL any more since Oracle got it. I am a crap web designer BTW, I generally do the other end.

Unsurprisingly Oracle want you to use Oracle database a not MySQL.