See also Commercial vs Open Source | Cookie-Cutter Portals | Mobile Portals | Government Portals
| Product | Work Proposed | Price | Difficulty | Project Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | Ongoing | ||||
| free 3rd party open source shopping cart + hosting + ecommerce integration | Design, System Support | Medium | Low | Medium | Small-Large |
| WWWalker developed custom shopping cart + hosting + ecommerce integration | Development, Design, System Support | High | Medium | Medium | Medium |
| 3rd party commercial portal + hosting + ecommerce integration | Redesign, Maintain, System Support | High | High | High | Medium |
We now install open source portals and tweak them for the user to maintain themselves or use and throw away as a beta site. The trend seems to be to setup and handover a site to a customer with no repeat business. The customer just wants the hard bits done by the developer such as installation, hosting and networking with the nicer bits such as design and content done by themselves.
We specialise in online catalogues, search engine optimisation and meta data creation.
If you want a more powerful site, such as a content management system (CMS) or portal, we can build a custom one for you. These are much more expensive to setup and trouble-shoot but are a one-off cost.
We can integrate ecommerce into the site to allow you to take payments securely over the Internet:
We also maintain and upgrade or extend existing Web portals.
We are getting more and more requests from customers who have bought 3rd party portal software on the Internet from overseas or Australia and need us to customise it for them, e.g. install their logo, improve security or add new features. If you outgrow this site, we can build a whole new system for you and migrate you across.
We prefer open source portals for preconfigured Linux/FreeBSD systems rather than Windows due to the high overheads of maintaining Microsoft Web servers and systems over Linux and FreeBSD. Also Windows customers tend to have very high expectations which a low budget cannot meet. Windows costs much more to maintain and upgrade than Linux or FreeBSD so it is not competitive to use for community or low-budget portals, only medium business portals.
We also move sites to new better quality hosting.
Users if they are using Web-based systems do not need to have their site running on Windows. Linux is OK.
Most users can only afford Linux but they will still push on with using far more expensive Windows system because of familiarity. They will have to outsource to a sysop or DBA (database administrator) to keep the system going (server and portal software maintenance). Our end is the development costs (the actual product).
Linux can integrate very smoothly with Windows and Mac and can do 90% of what a small company wants. To stop pushing prices down on development to cut costs, the user needs to adopt Linux with the help of a savvy developer like us.
If you choose Windows, we will charge the same for project support as we have our own project management system which handles any operating system or environment the customer can throw at us. This is to cover the extra system support, tools and knowledge required to maintain Windows and .NET software. Windows may be more powerful for middle-tier companies because they have already built 90% of their infrastructure on it for desktop users (not Internet) but more costly to move up to if you go the whole way with Microsoft. This cost was dropped as Microsoft and Novell make Linux and Windows more interoperable.
We only supply limited support for installation of open source software on Mac OS X Server.
We are closer to the customer than bigger companies so can still compete.
See Terms and Conditions for how we manage the project.
Contact us for a pricing request for a portal to enhance and grow your online business.
Created: 24 Jan 2006 17:57
Last Updated: 4 July 2020 11:26