Let’s get it out of the way right up front: Open Source is not the be-all, end-all for web design or development. There are projects where it makes a ton of sense to go Open Source. There are also reasons for choosing other routes. Right now, we’re helping to design and develop a rather large project that isn’t Open Source- it’s all Microsoft. And that decision was the correct one for the client and their situation.
That said, we use Open Source tools a lot, and most of our clients benefit from the advantages Open Source brings to their projects.
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has become our preferred development environment. Not because the tools are free, but because it gives us the ability to work with a wider variety of clients and a larger community of developers. I make a point to explain to clients what I think the biggest advantage to building their websites is using LAMP- there’s a ton of developers who can add to your project, you’re not tied to a proprietary system. If you decide you hate your web design company, it’s not that difficult to move to another one if you use LAMP. More importantly, it’s a lot easier to add to your project as time goes by, without having to do a complete redo.
In corporate-speak, LAMP lets you leverage assets. That can lead to a high ROI.
We also make a point to take advantage of the best that Open Source has to offer in the web design stage of a project. Yes, we almost always use Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver for our projects. But there’s a bunch of cool Open Source apps that make life as a web designer much easier (and more fun!).
#1 is Firefox. And not just because it’s a fast, standards-based Open Source web browser. Firefox gets really powerful when you start to customize it with add-ons. There’s add-ons that help you pick a color from a web page (very useful!), browse CSS rules, and inspect your code. The add-ons for Firefox make it the best debugging tool we’ve found when designing a tricky layout for a client. Of course, it’s also a killer web browser.
#2 is Subversion. That’s version control, and it’s imperative when you have more than a few people working on a website. Subversion lets you roll back changes if you make a mistake, and it helps ensure that your designers and developers aren’t overwriting each others’ work. For us, setting up a Subversion repository for each of our active clients has saved us about 10 solid days of hair-pulling, teeth gnashing pain. So far.
#3 is, of course, MODx. I’ve already written about MODx here, but suffice to say it’s the best Open Source CMS we’ve found.
#4, at last, is WordPress. The newer versions of WordPress are incredibly easy to install into a LAMP environment, and almost all of our clients have blogs. WordPress simplifies the process, and we love it. Again, the plugins are amazing.
A final caveat for companies looking to go Open Source: don’t think that your project will cost much less because it’s designed and developed using Open Source. Yes, you can find inexpensive offshore LAMP development. Yes, you’re tapping into a bigger market of developers if you go Open Source. But it still takes time and money to plan and implement successful websites and web development projects.
We explain to our clients that Open Source isn’t like getting a free car. It’s more like getting access to the highway system, and knowing that your car will be able to drive on almost any road it encounters. You still have to buy the car, plan your route, and put gas and oil in the car. But you can go just about anywhere with it. That’s pretty awesome.
