Laura wrote an interesting post Approaching a "brochureware" website using Drupal
"The idea of having a CMS to do a brochure site is that the client can change the content easily. Even a simple brochure site goes through periodic updates, and not just from press releases."
Although the description of the brochure site is educating, I always struggle to understand what is a brochure site anyway, the most interesting bit is the attitude radiating from the writeup. It is the opposite from the traditional sales model.
If you have more features, you'll pay far more
Well, Laura seems to favour exactly the opposite - quote the customer a brochure site and deliver them an ever expanding, flexible website. It's up to them to decide where to put the boundaries, rather than their budget.
Recently I had to work with a design company, doing web design as part of a bigger project. They had great visual ideas, technically the designs were bad. Initially they were having difficulties to understand what we want from them - Templates? What templates? Then after some discussions, they produced both jpegs, with the ideas - how things should look like, and a couple of html pages + css, which include all of the visual elements. Then after some dire struggles to clean up and refactor their design, while maintaining the visuals the things turned out OK. Stop moaning Vlado. OK. The whole point is that the work they've done for us on that project, is no more that the work they would have done designing a static website, maybe less. We wouldn't need to refactor anything, just fit the thing into phptemplate, if their work wa\sn't so sloppy - let's say half to one man-day work. And another 4 days for setting up the website and training the key personnel. Setup is about half a day really.
So if we draw the line - we have between a day or two more to charge our clients, for delivering them a flexible website they are fully in control of. Surely it can be turend into a successfull business strategy. Websites are commodities these days. The question is can this be done without OSS?
