http://www.radiantcore.com/ All of the Radiant Core posts tagged with foundation. en-ca Copyright 2006, Radiant Core Inc. All rights reserved. webmaster@radiantcore.com webmaster@radiantcore.com Andrew Reynolds <info@radiantcore.com> http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/08/02/2007/awesome http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/08/02/2007/awesome http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/08/02/2007/awesome#comments awesome. Not the “that’s amazing” awesome, but more of the flat-tone, blank-expression awesome, which gets followed by an awkward silence.  

I think a little background information is in order. Last December we embarked on a project unlike any other. The budget, no problem. The timeline, no problem. The technology, awesome… The production environment for the site-to-be consists of WebSphere Portal Server, DB2, and LDAP.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that this is an awful set up, I just had an initial shock of “Wow, these are some heavy duty pieces of software for the web site we’re building.” In all fairness though, WebSphere Portal server does have some nice features that are hard to find elsewhere.

Back to the Lunch and Learn. My goal was to make connections between Foundation (what we already know) and WebSphere Portal Server (what we will soon know). At some point during my presentation, after several awesomes, it became obvious that Foundation was a bad choice for drawing parallels. Let me put it this way: WebSphere portal is a huge chunk of software that only a mother could love, in this case IBM. Awesome…

I should probably explain more of what I mean by awesome. IBM has this stigma of being a huge life-sucking corporation with bulky software. This isn’t true at all, and I know several people who work at IBM who are all very nice people. In this case, awesome doesn’t mean “IBM? Well there goes my soul.” What it really comes down to is that IBM as a company provides products, and WebSphere Portal Server is a product that produces websites through configuration. Radiant Core, on the other hand, provides services, and Foundation is a tool for building websites. During the presentation each flat-tone, blank-expression awesome, followed by an awkward pause, was just our minds taking one step closer to this realization. Once we made that realization, and stopped trying to think of WebSphere Portal Server as Foundation, things went a lot smoother.   

Shifting our mindset to work within the confines of another company’s product will take some effort, but in the end I think it will do Radiant Core some good. As we work through this project we’ll be doing a lot more Lunch and Learns, and lot of reflecting on building a site versus configuring a site and where we would like Foundation to eventually fall on that scale. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be posting about everything we’ve gotten out of this project, from how we approach building software and websites to the importance of writing readable code. Check back next week and I’ll have more to share.

]]> Java, Tech Geekery Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:35:00 GMT Jay Goldman <info@radiantcore.com> http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/12/07/2006/skinningafox http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/12/07/2006/skinningafox http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/12/07/2006/skinningafox#comments Mozilla Firefox browser and vocal advocates for its adoption by every web surfer on the planet. Some of you have even felt the holy wrath of our preaching in person, endlessly berated to dump InternetExplorer in favour of the shiny red fox. We'll spare you a repeat episode, but if you haven't caught the routine yet - stick around! - we're here all week. And try the cheesecake. At any rate, it is with the greatest of pride that we hereby announce and proclaim that Radiant Core has been retained by Mozilla to design and implement the official theme for the Firefox 2 release! We've actually been hard at work on it for a few weeks, polishing pixels and zooming through XUL, but very much in stealth mode. If you'd like a sneak peek, Mike Beltzner has posted an overview of our work to date on the Mozilla wiki, or you can wait for the Firefox 2 Beta 2 release (see the schedule). Stay tuned to this here blog as we'll be posting a series of mini-articles walking through the process we followed, from rough drafts and ideas right through to the final XUL implementation.

It's been a very exciting privilege to work with the team responsible for the original Winstripe and Pinstripe teams and with the folks who regularly inspire and impress us with their dedication to the Mozilla community. We're really looking forward to making our own contribution. We've also been lucky enough to bring back an old Radiant Core favourite (and original co-founder!), Mr. Sean Martell, who has been doing the bulk of the actual pixel pushing and icon shining.

And while you're here, why not take a look at our Portfolio to see some of the other work we've done, or check out Foundation, our award-winning Website Management Platform. You can also subscribe to a variety of feeds for the blog if you'd like to stay up to date.]]> Taking Care of Business Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:10:00 GMT Jay Goldman <info@radiantcore.com> http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/10/06/2006/costvsvalue http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/10/06/2006/costvsvalue http://www.radiantcore.com/blog/archives/10/06/2006/costvsvalue#comments
Looks like it all got started when Chris Pearson got tired of being asked and threw down the gauntlet. He quoted some other folks from a SxSW panel, including Peter Flaschner of Toronto's own The Blog Studio (and no stranger to Radiant Core, having collaborated on a few projects), and mentions Javier Cabrera. Peter expanded on his SxSW discussion in a lengthy but excellent post on TBS' blog. Go read - I'll wait while you catch up.

We've been in this game as Radiant Core since August 2003, and individually as freelancers and members of other agencies since the web basically started. I've seen people pay almost nothing and get incredible websites and I've heard of a company paying $800,000 for a basic marketing site with a contact form. I'm sure it would be great for our clients if the industry standardized on pricing, but that would make us an exception rather than a rule - try getting your house renovated to understand what I mean. We often use a house building analogy when explaining our process to our clients because it helps them to understand why building a quality website takes as long as it does (except with Brookfield Homes, since they actually do build houses). You would never choose to live in an unattractive house where the builder cut corners, so why would you choose to live that way online? Granted, there's less risk of having the roof come crashing in on your head, but having tying your online reputation to someone else's design and development work can end up having some serious consequences if they don't know what they're doing.

It's harder for us to list our pricing because we build everything from so-called brochureware marketing sites (see Päaeez as an example) right through to complex web applications (see the Brookfield Customer Connection). We don't follow a fixed pricing model where we shoehorn customers into a specific bracket, so each job gets priced on its own merits and complications. Generally speaking, smaller sites built on our Foundation Website Management Platform start at about $3000 (including design and Foundation licenses), level off at about $5000 for a more complex site with Flash, and again at about $8000 for a site involving eCommerce. The sky's the limit after that, based on our clients' timelines, requirements, and imaginations. We've built entirely custom applications (though always based on our trusty Foundation) for anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000. Our competitive analyses have shown that we sit somewhere around the Lexus point of the industry, which is where we're quite comfortable and happy to be. What's the Lexus point you say? If we sold cars, we'd be in the Lexus range: luxurious and high performance with excellent quality and customer service.

This dovetails nicely into a conversation that started at the first TorCamp back in Novermber '05 and continued at the Cost vs. Value Roundtable dinner. Our industry has adopted the pricing models of the advertising and marketing worlds because we very closely match their services (and often work with them). We generally build things using the "Cost" model, where we figure out how much it will cost us to design and develop a project, add in a little profit margin, and that's the number we give our clients. The question raised by Jon Lax of teehan+lax: why don't we use the "Value" model? We should be pricing projects not based entirely on what they cost us to build, but rather on what their value is to our clients. In other words, if a major multinational approached us to build a website, we should adjust the price based on the impact it will have on their bottom line.

Let's use our friends over at Widget Emporium as an example (a funny little fictional company who we developed to demo Foundation). Let's say that they sell 1,000 widgets a year through their old website, with an average price tag of $100 each, which is $100,000 a year in revenue. Now let's say that they approach us for a redesign and expansion of their site, with the goal of selling 100,000 widgets a year, or $10,000,000 in revenue. If we charge them $10,000 for their site and they reach their goal with our strategic advice, we'll have enabled them to achieve $9,990,000 in additional revenue after the cost of our services. The Value approach to pricing suggests that, instead of $10,000, we should price the job at something like $2,500,000, or 25% of their first year gain. Although that sounds fantastic to us, the client is unlikely to go for it since it requires them to adopt a big risk - if they don't hit their targets, they'll still have paid us a big wad of cash. But what if we priced the site at, say, $25,000, and then signed on to receive 25% of their first year revenues? We've now got an incentive to turn their old site into an eCommerce powerhouse, and they've spread the risk out much more evenly.  If you watched the Jim Coudal video that we linked to earlier this week, you'd have heard Jim mention the exact same train of thought about 1/3 of the way in.

(Brief aside that might have been better as another post but isn't in another post so you're stuck with it here: This gets more complicated with sites that don't sell things directly (like our recent Bacardi Breezer project, or our work for Mozilla), but it really just means getting more creative with your metrics. If the conversion goal of the site is to get people to download the client's software and they have a 10% conversion rate of demo downloads to sales and sales are worth $250 each, then each download is worth about $25. If your new work increases the amount of downloads to 100,000 a year, it's worth $2,500,000 in downloads.)

It all sounds great and there are definitely some clients out there who will go for it (and a lot of clients who will suggest the 25% without the initial $25k, thereby asking us to shoulder all the risk). The problem is one that both Chris and Peter touched on: if there's someone out there willing to build the site for $5k and do a halfway decent job, then we can never progress to a more - well - progressive pricing model. If everyone in the industry made the jump together, perhaps led by a few big players who explained why it made sense and tried it successfully with some larger clients, then everyone would benefit. We haven't played this game yet because we're waiting for the right client to come along (maybe that's you - get in touch). I promise to write it up on here as soon as we do.
]]> Taking Care of Business Sat, 10 Jun 2006 10:53:00 GMT