quadrant6

I'm curious to know peoples' thoughts on how the future bodes for firms providing custom web development as a service? in a time when things are increasingly being commoditized and automated.

The likes of squarespace, shopify, wordpress etc serve standard website needs pretty well these days. For more functional and complex sites or apps, custom development is still a necessity. But will that always be the case?

I've been thinking about this and it feels like there'll always be space for custom development but that scope will narrow over time. And that a completely custom-built website will become more of a rarity. Instead, it will be custom integrations and implementations - small pieces of development linking together UI, APIs and services.

It makes me believe that most of these firms will need to be able to offer a mixture of cloud integration and development to remain competitive.

No doubt there'll always be that space for hardcore 100% custom development. But I see that becoming niche.

What do you think?

If you're a web development company or similar and have a good number of clients, you probably have a good number of sensitive details you keep on file (logins for ftp, ssh, domain, email, analytics etc)

My question is what do people use to store these securely while making them accessible to a development team?

In a general sense, I'm asking how small firms that specialise in custom web development for complex apps and sites market themselves successfully when customers often just think they need a 'web design' company.

I work for a small firm with about 15 people and the company is split between doing Software/Database Development (proprietary piece of software we specialise in) and custom web development (based on CodeIgniter/MySQL, some Ruby).

The custom web development started out as websites for customers that already had database development going on with us so it was a lot about integration. Now, almost 10 years later, it stands on its own and I believe we're building quality solutions and have a really good team of people here.

The problem is we compete against companies that build on top of things like Joomla etc where the design details are lost, the functionality is often fudged and the customer never has complete ownership of the system.

But when that is $20k and we are $40k, the customer often doesn't see the value up front. We have however had a number of customers come to us after being stuck with horrible CMS systems that promised all the functionality they wanted but were impossible to use easily and clunky.

In my opinion, we should be emphasising quality, attention to detail, openness (in that we build on open platforms and the customer has the code/database at the end of the day) and technical know-how.

I also wondered whether it'd work better to split off a company just for the web because the a split message is always going to make marketing harder when you're using a single website?

Sorry this is a bit messy, I was basically hoping to hear from people in similar markets about what has worked and what hasn't.

After launching a free web app about a year ago, it's sitting on around 5% active users (used it within last 2 days).

Although I could and plan to do more to increase uptake, should I take that percentage as fairly typical? or quite bad. It seems low to me. I would have thought more like 10%.

365psd.com provides psd files with UI elements, templates etc that are free for commercial use.

Is there anything out there that does the same for CSS/HTML snippets? (of a similar high standard)

I need to learn chinese mandarin but don't have easy access to real in-person tutelage, because of my location.

Can anyone suggest a good method, place to start, be it DVD or online etc.