Grow my business - app building

Michael's web design business was growing. No longer able to cope on his own he was looking to employ one or two people to help, and needed to choose carefully how he divided up the roles and skills.

What brought things to a head was when his existing clients started asking him to redesign their websites, but this time along with the new look, they also wanted integrated data-driven application functionality: event booking, ecommerce, membership profile management and the like.

As a graphic design specialist, this was beyond Michael's ability, and he knew he had to either employ some PHP programmers, or find some software to extend his capabilities, otherwise he would lose his clients to more capable competitors.

Evaluating alternatives

Michael examined a variety of alternative approaches to manag the grwth in his web design business before settling on clearString.

He first looked at employing PHP programmers, either as direct employees, or outsourced. Having spoken with friends who had tried this, he learned that this was an expensive and risky approach: it is hard to find programmers who are both affordable and as good as they would like to believe they are.

Further, if he did manage to recruit the mythical magic programmer, he would need to keep him, forever. Otherwise, when a client wanted some programming changed in years to come, it would be hard or impossible for anyone else to upgrade their site without starting over: programmers hate to work with someone else's code, and will find any excuse to force a rewrite instead.

Michael decided instead to employ a graphic designer, and find some software that would allow them to provide their clients with the data-driven functionality, but without the programming overhead. Assessing the market they found it split into three classes: the ultra-expensive corporate solutions, that did everything but needed to come with a consultant to explain how it worked; the template-based framework systems that promised everything, but turned out to abandon you to programming as soon as you needed anything specific; and open source systems that started with good intentions, but were only half-finished, and lacked professional support.

And then of course, they found clearString: providing a feature-rich yet programming-free environment, designed with a growing web design company in mind.

Getting started

Michael, and his new assistant Hugo, decided to start with a multi-site license, since they could use this both for development, and for hosting client sites, which they felt was a growth area for their business - both to bring in regular revenue, and to provide an on-going relationship with their clients so they would be first in line for new design work.

Client reaction

Michael decided not to tell his clients he was using clearString, and instead opted to let them assume their sites were being individually programmed. clearString's white-box rebrandability allowed him to extend his corporate identity into the site editing environment his clients see, so they gain the impression his business is far bigger than it is.

With business continuing to grow, Michael is now looking to employ another graphic designer, in the knowledge that since his clearString license is per-server, not per-developer, this will not cost him any extra.

Postscript

Six months later Michael reports that Hugo has left, and he has taken on Kimberley. She has been able to rapidly take over maintenance of the sites Hugo had worked on, as clearString's graphical configuration interface made it easy to explore the site structure and data pathways. If Michael had employed Hugo as PHP programmer, that transition would have been infinitely harder.

Learn more about the clearString features that helped Michael...

The customer insight stories in this section are based on feedback from our clients, but we have changed their names to protect their identities.