User Friendly Websites; a new system from Open Door Internet
You may have noticed that a few recent tweets, status updates, and comments have been about a system I've been calling "User Friendly Websites". This has been a cause for some intrigue, so I thought I'd write a quick blog about them.
"User Friendly Websites" is a new platform that we have launched. It's a centrally hosted system that allows us to launch websites for customers.
Unlike our bespoke systems however we're not writing code for each client; the same code is shared across all the sites on the system. That offers two great benefits:
- You get very stable code, as when a bug is fixed for one website it's fixed for all of them. It also means you'll be on a system that is well maintained and constantly updated.
- Because we're not writing the code each time we can offer the system a lot cheaper that we can our bespoke packages.
Essentially I've taken everything I've learnt in the past five years of building bespoke websites and packaged up the essentials into a new system.
The system isn't for everyone however. It's designed for users that want only page and news management for their site. It also imposes some quite strict design limitations - we can't add or remove bespoke features without affecting all sites.
The system launched at the beginning of September, and there's a number of clients now using it - charges start from just £20 (+VAT) per month!
Sites can be styled from the control panel with no HTML or CSS knowledge, so there's no need for a setup charge if you want to do that. If you do have HTML and CSS the system allows for a lot of additional design changes. We're starting to put together the documentation pages to help you.
However if you'd like your site to have some design time spending on it and to have us help you load the initial content the costs are around £250+VAT per site - and so far that's a service that everybody has wanted to take.
This really is a very affordable way to get yourself a website.