How do I find a good web 2.0 development company?

April 4, 2006 7:59 AM

I am looking for suggestions as to small, good, and fast Web 2.0 website development companies for a near-term project...

I am working on a project where we need a very specific website developed as a prototype. The design is relatively straightforward, but we would like to use both a simple drag-and-drop interface, and incorporate user voting ala Threadless. The site will be fielded as an experiment by a large company, so it needs to be stable and relatively polished. While not swimming in cash, there is probably an adequate budget to do this, we just need to find a fast and smart web development group with the relevant experience and some design sense to work with, and I have no idea how to find one. Any thoughts out there?

posted by blahblahblah to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

First thing you need to realise is that web 2.0 is hype. It's not an actual 'thing'. Find a good web development company, but please, don't use a company that actually advertises itself as web 2.0. Instead see what sort of technolgies they do incorporate - best way to judge a web company is to look at their client sites.
posted by twistedonion at 8:46 AM on April 4, 2006

blahblahblah, if you're looking for something small and steady, you might look for an independent. Web 'companies' tend to introduce a lot of overhead on small projects that you really don't need. I've got a guy that used to work for me who's an absolute GENIUS at the "Web 2.0" stuff -- which, as twistedonion said, isn't really a specific technology, but a marketing buzzword that describes some hacks made to HTML using javascript to give it the feeling of a stateful application.

If you'd like his contact info, my email's in my profile.
posted by SpecialK at 8:50 AM on April 4, 2006

I've been looking into a web development firm that understands what Web 2.0 means (good standard code, CSS designs, AJAX, etc.). One of my best picks is ClearLeft. All three of them are regular speakers at web conferences and have written books on CSS, DOM scripting, etc.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 9:36 AM on April 4, 2006

Shameless Plug: I run a small Internet Development company that would love to take on such a project: Tipit Communications. We are a Microsoft .NET shop* w/ experience in pure CSS design & AJAX. We use the Telerik toolset for rapid development of many common AJAX tasks combined w/ custom programming any specific requirements (perfect for a polished prototype).

If you are interested in talking more drop me a line through the form on our site.



*No flames, we have done many projects using LAMP but have adopted .NET for pragmatic reasons in integrating our clients online presences w/ established back office technologies. Not to mention the OO nature of .NET is fairly well done especially for modular development (IMHO).
posted by JpMaxMan at 10:53 AM on April 4, 2006

Another Shameless Plug: My small web dev firm specializes in standards compliant xhtml/css, and we work a lot with Ruby on Rails and AJAX (yes we still do php). Everything we do is custom coded from scratch. You should certainly e-mail me before you make a final decision, the e-mail is in my profile.
posted by banished at 12:17 PM on April 4, 2006

Chaps: I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is frowned upon, if not outright banned. If everyone who ran a webshop chimed in on these questions...

In fact, every single one of JpMaxMan's answers has been a self-link or plug for his own company. Looks like someone needs reminding of the rules.
posted by blag at 1:20 PM on April 4, 2006

Sorry to offend. To gain back some meta-karma, here is a site I just remembered that lists development firms:

The Firm List
posted by JpMaxMan at 1:43 PM on April 4, 2006