Business

What a pleasure to work with Freelock in launching our family website for the West Seattle community. John and Jill were vital to our success. We quickly saw that Drupal could handle our scope of requirements and thrilled to find that many of our wish list features were doable with such a capable staff. Communication and support are out of this world impressive with the Freelock team and set the standard for the industry. On time and in budget. Freelock is the clear choice.

Scott Coughlin, a 24-season veteran of Alaska's salmon, herring and halibut fisheries, came to Freelock for help getting his site done. We picked up the pieces of the development project, yet again, and implemented the design, functionality, and enhancements in record time. As part of this site, Ubercart was used for purchasing memberships to the site. A clean crisp design highlights the user profiles for job seekers in the fishing industry.

Scott is now rolling on his next project with Freelock. Check back for details!

The folks at WSFZ needed a directory-based website that was easy to maintain and easy to use. Catering to the families of this popular Seattle-area neighborhood, West Seattle, WSFZ wanted a clean, simple design that allows for blogging, reader comments, and advertising. The site includes pre-schools, daycares, doulas, and other family-related resources.

Check out the site for reader recommendations and kid-friendly restaurants!

If you are, drop us a line.

I know, that's an ambiguous title -- are we looking for Drupal help, or are we offering it? The answer is yes!

Just the other day I got a request for proposal for hosting, complete with a statement that they knew of some hosting that would cost $15/month. The implication being that they were looking for a hosting proposal that would not exceed that amount.

Right off the bat, there's a problem here. Just the cost of paying the salary of an employee to assemble a proposal would likely exceed half a year of the total revenue at this rate! Expecting somebody to spend the time to bid on such a service at that rate is... well, ludicrous. We would lose money to even bid on the job.

Today, in the Washington State legislature, the House and the Senate are reconciling their two different bills to balance the State budget. Both involve significant tax changes, and there are different ramifications for software depending on which goes through.

Mel asks:

Why would I use Drupal instead of Microsoft Expression Web to create a website?

I actually had to look to find out what Expression Web is--I hadn't heard of it before. It looks like a successor to FrontPage, something similar to DreamWeaver for creating static web sites.

So to rephrase, why should I build a site on a content management system, instead of using a tool that lets me build a site directly?

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.

Another large scale project by Freelock Computing, the Organic Materials Research Institute tested our abilities to work with a variety of sources and the Drupal system. The project brought their old public facing website built on PHP to the Drupal CMS and is still synced nightly with their internal master database built on Access.