2 March 2010
Hi Anna,

You stock a fantastic range of gowns - you must be really pleased that it is all coming together.

We would be delighted to help - our philosophy is to be as transparent as possible and to create truly unique and functional sites that assist in building a successful business. We cost everything by the hour and this in turn can be broken down into half and quarter hours where applicable so that you see exactly what we are doing for the money.

Obviously NZ is on a totally different time zone, so please feel free to email or skype me for a further chat. It would be lovely to work with you.

naomi@mspan.co.uk

All the best with completing your project and I look forward to hearing from you.

Naomi Frisher

4 March 2010
Hi Anna

I've taken a look around your website and, whilst I think it is visually pleasing, so far it only seems to be composed of flat HTML. There don't appear to be any features that would require the use of the Symfony framework yet.

It should be possible to hire a developer with experience in that framework but I would recommend against it because I think you will repeatedly end up in the same situation when you need to add new features to your website (e.g. eCommerce, CMS, galleries, blog etc.). If you do decide to hire a developer then I wouldn't worry too much about them being geographically local to you but I would stress the importance of getting a fixed, quoted price and not paying by the hour (so the incentive is for the developer to deliver on time).

Our company policy is to build websites using open source Content Management Systems or eCommerce platforms. This benefits both us and our clients because we're building on tried and tested, easy-to-use software with a huge range of commercial-grade modules available. Our clients are happy to find that most, if not all, the features they want come as standard, less common features can be installed or developed quickly, and they have the peace of mind of knowing that there is a very active community of developers working with their software.

So my recommendation is to build on an established platform. It wouldn't take long to reproduce your entire website in a CMS that you could easily manage and update yourself (at any time and for no extra cost). If you'd like to discuss this further with us please feel free to contact us.