Yoo-hoo, are you out there somewhere?

When I sell a web site sys­tem to a client, I like to be clear on the fact that what I’m sell­ing them is not a closed-source pro­pri­etary solu­tion. I think this is impor­tant for every­one but espe­cially for non-profit organ­i­sa­tions. Too many times I’ve helped out an organ­i­sa­tion whose domain name and host­ing are inac­ces­si­ble to them – they are locked into a sys­tem with one devel­oper, typ­i­cally at a large cost, and have no way of chang­ing host­ing, chang­ing devel­op­ers, or get­ting their data out with­out start­ing from scratch. In the worst case one group couldn’t even update their site and the devel­oper was not answer­ing the phone.

Some peo­ple might look at that and think that it’s smart busi­ness on the part of the devel­oper – but in my view, it’s an out­dated way of think­ing. Your cus­tomers should be com­ing back to you because they’ve always got­ten great ser­vice and they love what you’ve done for them. If you’re not look­ing after them any­more then they deserve better.

Any­how, what this comes back to is that one of the sys­tems we push for larger, more com­plex sites is Far­Cry. A few times peo­ple have called me out on my state­ment that there are devel­op­ers actively work­ing with the sys­tem all over the world and ask for exam­ples – and usu­ally they are only inter­ested in Aus­tralia. I can point to a few obvi­ous ones – Dae­mon them­selves, for exam­ple, and a few other organ­i­sa­tions I’ve worked with in Perth – but I fig­ure there must be many more that I sim­ply don’t know about.

Shar­ing this infor­ma­tion about where the devel­op­ers actu­ally are can only ben­e­fit the entire com­mu­nity, in my view. I actu­ally think this is infor­ma­tion that should be pub­lished on the Far­Cry web site. But we can start by out­ing indi­vid­ual com­pa­nies, I think.

I’m happy to share the list I com­pile with any­one who wants it and I’ll even pub­lish it here if no one on it objects. So leave a com­ment or send me an email – kay@smoljak.com. I know you’re out there!