JohnValenty.com

In the late 90’s our initial website development “conversations” started at around $50,000 and actual proposals were commonly being drawn in the $250,000 range. This was not just us, it was happening all over the country. By the time clients made the typical numerous changes and added features to their vision, there were million-dollar+ websites being born.

That was the norm back then.

As time went on and technology got better, we could eventually develop complex database-driven websites for under $100,000.

Today, many of those same complex database-driven websites can be professionally built for $10-30K using open-source technology.

If you have not jumped on the open-source bandwagon yet, you are really missing out. I’ve been developing software for 11 years and I can tell you that as a software developer, in most cases, it is nearly impossible to compete with the efficiency and quantity of open source projects.

What is open source technology? It is a community of software developers who all agree to do things a certain way and share their work. The result is tens-of-thousands of developers all over the world improving the software for everyone. You can’t complete with this kind of limitless power.

So, how do you harness it? Just use it or work with developers like my company Earnware that can customize open source technology for your project. There is no purpose in scratch building a rowboat when there are ships you can get for pennies right next door. The expense in developing your project still takes highly technical people, project managers, programmers, and designers, but you can get a lot more for your investment when you go the open source route.

By developing your site on one of these open source platforms, you will have the most affordable access to the work of thousands of people. The challenge is in putting the pieces together, integrating, customizing, and extended the features and functionality to be just right for your project. There are 3 large open source community projects which are the most widely used.

http://joomla.org (Free CMS + Mostly Free Components & Modules)
http://drupal.org (Free CMS + Mostly Free Components & Modules)
http://wordpress.org (Free CMS + Mostly Free Components & Modules)
http://dotnetnuke.com (Free CMS + Mostly Commercial Components & Modules)

Joomla is by far the largest open source community which my company Earnware Corporation has chosen to build many client websites on. We have also done a slick integration with Joomla and some of our popular suite of marketing and communication tools. The best thing about Joomla is that you can build quick template-driven sites that integrate with thousands of free components and modules. You can also build fully custom designs which have no technical limitations and also integrate with thousands of free (or inexpensive) components and modules.

In addition to a having a slick content management interface which makes website management so much easier, Joomla URL's are fairly Search Engine Friendly (SEF) right out of the gate. This is a huge advantage to website owners looking to begin their search engine optimization process. 

If you have a web project in mind and would like some professional help. Visit http://Earnware.com. If you have any thoughts or questions about this article, just post a comment below.

John Valenty