About
My company EDevMachine is basically just me, but my wife (who is a national marketing director for a large corporation) sometimes helps out writing content. I don’t outsource any code and I do all design work. If the need should ever I may on occasion outsource a graphic to get a second “look” (like getting a second doctor’s opinion).
On the design/development side I offer (x)html, css, javascript, Coldfusion, ASP-classic, Flash and sometimes ASP.net (w/ MSAccess,SQLServer,MySQL databases) and AJAX as required. I do not do any PHP - nor do I outsource any such work.
At this time Coldfusion is my preferred language. Most of my clients have gone with Coldfusion - it is very fast to develop with (read:cost-effective), and can be installed on both Windows and Linux servers. Know that it does need to be installed on your server and this is usually an extra hosting cost to consider.
ASP-classic is a very “low-level” Windows server language. It allows much greater control in development, but you pay for that in terms of complexity (read: takes longer to develop so has higher development costs). You will find that most (if not all) Windows servers have ASP already installed and doesn’t have any extra costs. I developed my site www.EDevMachine.com in purely ASP-classic for the express reason that I (as a developer) should show work at the lowest possible level.
ASP.net is a “higher-level” language (like Coldfusion) and is often also already installed on Windows servers - sometimes free, sometimes for extra cost. It is not my preferred language for very extensive development. Honestly, I don’t feel that at this time I am “up-to-speed” with ASP.net as much as with Coldfusion, but it is offered for limited development. There’s is also some speed concern using asp.net with large websites having upwards of 1000 pages - which is why I haven’t spent much time using it.
Although I have always offered Flash, I have usually limited Flash design to just addon components for search engine marketing reasons. This has recently changed - Google and Yahoo (about 75% of the search engine traffic) have started indexing content contained in Flash files. So in the near future (after I complete some indexing tests) I’ll be offering 100% Flash/Flex website design (including my website).
Hosting accounts: Basically there are three types of hosting account you can get. A shared hosting account will usually have some sort of server-side scripting (Coldfusion, PHP, etc.) available, but you will unlikely be able to install any extra sofware. A virtual private server (VPS) is like shared-hosting, but you are allowed some installation privledges. Lastly is a pure “dedicated server” (or optionly some sort of co-location), which is where you are allocated an entire server and you may install/unstall software and basically do whatever you want. Also to consider is which server operating system is being used (Window or Linux), and which databases and server-side languages are available.