Our philosophy has always been to develop the NewfangledCMS in such a way that its code can be reused across many sites. As a result, every site that we create gives us the opportunity to further develop the NewfangledCMS functionality and applications. When we are developing a site that requires a new feature or piece of custom programming, we will always stop to consider the new feature's potential usefulness to other clients. If we determine that the feature has the potential for broad application, we will typically invest a significant amount of our own research and development time into the project. Our R&D allows us to create new applications that will address the needs not only of that particular client, but of other future clients as well. For example, let's say that a client comes to us and asks us to create a mechanism that will allow them to upload financial data from an excel file to the NewfangledCMS so that they can make it available to partners on their website. We would have two options. We could build a customized tool specifically for that client to upload the data file. Alternately, we could invest some of our own time to build a more generic data upload mechanism that could then be used to upload other types of excel data for a variety of website applications. This has proven to be a very efficient method of development. The approach benefits our clients by expanding the available base of NewfangledCMS functionality and by limiting the extent to which they are responsible for the high costs of custom programming. In short, our new and existing clients benefit from work that we have done for past clients. We have built many useful applications that are available to all of our NewfangledCMS clients. Once built, these applications can be installed into a website for a fraction of the cost of creating the functionality from scratch.

But sometimes a customer's needs are highly specialized and would require the creation of an entirely new NewfangledCMS application. In these cases it is still necessary for us to build a custom application to meet those needs. We always educate the client about the higher maintenance costs for custom code. Custom code will always have more bugs, since it hasn't been tested over time and in a variety of sites. Additionally, when changes need to be made to custom software, they are always more expensive because of the complex and individually customized nature of the code. For this reason, wherever possible, we try to steer clients away from highly customized code and attempt to modify their requirements to fit within something an existing NewfangledCMS application or modified NewfangledCMS application would solve.


When pricing a project, the following questions can help to hone in on the scope of a project and its appropriate budget range.

1. What are the visual design requirements for the project? Who will be providing the design? Are there existing corporate design standards and logo?
   
2. Roughly how large is the site in terms of page count and how complex are the pages?
   
3. Will the site use any NewfangledCMS applications?
   
4. Does the site require complex component functionality, such as password protection (extranets and intranets) or e-commerce?
   
5. Does the site have any unusual needs that extend beyond the basic display of content and existing component functionality?
   
6. Will the site need to integrate with any other existing systems?
   

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