Are any of your ecommerce systems making a profit?
All of the ones we built from scratch and manage are making a profit. If we are asked to do a partial build, and are not managing it ourselves, your mileage will vary.
How much do you charge?
A usability review and report on your web site's home page might only be $300. A from-scratch fully interactive training course for 2,000 employees costs more. If in doubt, send us an email or give us a call.
How We Charge
We can work on a fixed contract price, or by the hour.
Contract
Ninety percent of our clients know roughly or exactly what they want. If that is you, then please send us a RFQ/RFP or MRD, and we will get back to you within 72 business hours with a suggested SOW and corresponding estimate.
Hourly or Hourly Leading to Contract
Many companies don't know what they want. That's fine; we like interesting challenges. However, it moves on to the second concept, by the hour. If you don't know what you need, we have to figure out a solution. That takes time. We are happy to talk for an hour, so you can check us out. That's an interview. Once we start looking at your website or software system, and you start asking advice, that's analysis, and we ask for a retainer before providing analysis. Hours are billed against the retainer, and lead on to one of two situations:
1. We answer your questions candidly, and then write a plan of action with an estimate. You sign off on the estimate, send us a retainer, and we start work.
2. The same, except you decide you can carry out the plan yourself.
In either case both our companies save time and money. You get prompt analysis, both wide-ranging and detailed, which you can use immediately – instead of vague sales pitches that lead you on to multiple vendor interviews in the hope that you can put together the picture yourselves. Because we have been paid for our time, we get a customer, and potentially a valuable client, which means we respond to your next email or call promptly. Because such analyses can typically be done for $300-$1000, executive approval for your expense is usually not needed, and you can have a clear, well-thought analysis in hand within a week.
Do you have references?
For small jobs, please see our Clients page and the linked samples. For larger jobs we are happy to provide individual references.
Who would be in charge of our project?
Someone with at least ten years of development experience.
Do you use XML? (... Ruby on Rails, Python, etc.)
Yes ... we answer carefully. We do not have a shortage of markup or programming languages.
However the hard part is knowing which languages to use for what architecture.
Here is an excerpt from the legendary Frederick Brooks’ No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
"The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.
No other part of the conceptual work is as difficult as establishing the detailed
technical requirements, including all the interfaces to people, to machines, and to
other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if
done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later."
Hastings Research rectifies a lot of software systems.
That’s how we got into commercial work – companies turning up at
our door with failed or outdated software systems.
If you want it done right the first time, please get in touch with us first. If you have a disaster on your hands, we'll have a look at it.
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FAQs