Open Source Web Applications

If you are a small or larger business currently having a hard time in the current economic climate, or just a savvy web owner, then why not save substantial money (on average over 50%) by going down the open source route for your website or blog needs.

Indeed even if your requirements are slightly more involved than a website it is also useful to take a look the current state of Open Source offerings within the range of solutions you are looking for. This is most cases would equate to bringing in an expert to advise you. Of course you could do this yourself however bringing in some-one who does this on a daily basis will not only save you time but also confirm the solution you have choose to be up to the job (your require it for).

You may have heard that it is possible to download free website designs, however what may surprise you is the number of sophisticated applications (such as Face-book or Twitter alternatives) available for free download as Open Source applications on the web. If you are fairly non-technical what may surprise you also is the fact that the majority of the World’s websites run on the Open Source web server, Apache, running on the open source Operating system Linux (e.g. a Windows equivalent)!

The main reason that we would always advise that a given client take a look at this route (espically if they are looking for a new website or a website modification) is that this method not only lowers the time taken for the initial design to be created, but also the development costs as well as giving the client the chance to see their new website (90% of it) before any work begins; This is more so for website designs than for applications (which are of course more about the functionality that they offer more than what they look like).

If you have worked with a fair number of small business then you will no doubt recognise the fact that initial designs can be a complete nightmare that never seems to end. One part the website design gets changed or evolved and then often a few days or weeks later the client will ask if ‘we can try this or that’. This of course in (most cases) will  completely change the overall feel of the design and hence will then need to be re-tweaked in order to bring back balance. By using an Open Source design you can essentially get your client to sign-off (on the design) upfront leaving them to concentrate on content rather than design.

In most of the cases that we have worked with the client has been more than happy to keep the designers link in place, often a requirement mandated within the end Open Source license, however some-times (mainly for commercial reasons) this is a complete non-starter and other options must be looked at. Don’t worry, for those that are adamant that they do not want the designers link kept in place then in most cases you have 2 further options.

The first is to check or ask the original designer if you can pay them (normally a small fee) in order to remove the link from the design or application. A lot of designers already offer this “upgrade”, with most others (in our opinion) happy to negotiate in order to offer this.

The second option is to recreate the design from scratch using the original design as the starting point; all code and graphics will have to be redesigned, however as stated above because the designer will know exactly what you require in most cases they can quote you more effectively that would be the case if they had to work out the original design first. Design in this case meaning “what you see”.

It is of up most importance for some-one, either yourself or the technical person or team that is working for you, to check the Open Source license agreement in place. Some allow modification but not re-sell, others allow re-sell, and believe it or not but others attribute any of your changes back into the original license so that actually it could be given away for free!