Prettybooked.com turning a startup into a reality.

 

Don't ask a bricklayer to design a house.

In the construction industry, there is a profession called Architects, they are responsible for co-ordinating the process of construction a building. What we are seeing all to often is basically that the Interior designer or the bricklayer is being asked to design the house. This works well if it's a wall around your barbecue, but if you are looking to build a house to live in (eg. a website that lasts). You would eventually realize it's worth going to the people who are best qualified to do this, Otherwise it will fall down after the first floor..

That is in essence is what Roo J Solutions was set up to do. After providing this Software Development Architect role for clients that realize that it's essential that they work with someone who not only understands their business operations intimately, but also how to implement this in a cost effective way. We carry on working with these companies for many years. We decided a long time ago that providing a professional service, rather than trying to make a fast buck was the only way to do this kind of business.

Anyway back to the prettybooked.com release.

Before I mention any of the technical stuff, I have to commend this client on the foresight in running this project. As a startup, she has embraced the concept that if you are running a startup, get the business going as fast as possible. You will have to cut corners, there are features that 'would be nice' but it if you are going to turn an idea into a reality, you have to start making decisions. This is one of the biggest problems with software development, the ease  that you can continue refining and improving indefinitely, you really have to make those decisions to go live, and push features to a later date.

Prettybooked, behind the scenes.

One of the reasons we can build applications quickly, and deliver innovative features without breaking the bank is that the we have spend many years developing the underlying infrastructure for web driven applications.

It's pretty rare that we will use an open source application like wordpress, jommla or drupal to start a project. This is because they generally provide a considerable amount of scrappy infrastructure that can speed up some parts but cripple others. In the long run they do not provide anything close to the infrastructure we have build up over the years.

For an online blog, or very basic interactive site, if they work when installed, and a couple of plugins solve the remaining issues, then we would probably recommend them. But any more than that, the cost frequently outweighs the benefits. In this same manner we understand that some tools are better suited to some scenarios, and others are not. JQuery being a prime example in this in a project, it's great for a few effects on some pages, but If we had used this here, then maintenance would very quickly become a nightmare.

So when we looked at prettybooked, the speed it could be developed was seriously helped by using the Pman infrastructure, Basic modeling for a company type, authenticated users, event logging, and a content management system, meant that the only real development which was needed was focused around the services and booking. So we could use the budget for the project on providing the interactive search and booking system.


Anyway take a look, it's been an interesting project, and we look forward to seeing it grow.