It’s been an exciting year for Griffio. The web company has found a lot of success riding the whole blog craze, which is a good thing ’cause I’m a big believer in the power of blogging. Though many of our prospective clients don’t “get it” (i.e. “We’re gonna start this blog to hard sell our products, and it’s going to be awesome!”), it’s good to see companies exploring the medium in an effort to grow their businesses. Regardless, its been a great year.

We’re really excited about a new Ruby on Rails project were developing for Chad Blodgett (he’s a class act even though he’s paying us) of Weight Loss Wars. Chad’s taking a risk and investing heavily in a new social site that will serve as a free weight loss community that bundles paid competitions. We’ve finished the web analysis, planning, and development phase 1/3, and its coming along nicely thanks mostly impart to our excellent Rails ninja, Robert Bradford. Robert has been developing Rails apps for 11 months now and used to be a die hard PHP/MySQL developer for several years until discovering Ruby on Rails. That should tell you something about the framework. We’ve definitely enjoyed using it.

For all those who have been kind enough to refer word-of-mouth work, I thank you. You’re support and belief in what we do is golden. Where do I see the company heading next year? That’s to be determined, but we really like helping companies weigh all viable website strategies before making a development recommendation (what we call a “Discovery Package”). Far too many companies go into a web project thinking they know what they want when they don’t. They then request bids from developers before actually doing any research. The result largely ends up being close to what was desired (and sometimes not) without ever knowing what was really needed. Companies don’t need a desired website, they need one that leverages existing technologies and marketing given their modus operandi. We’re trying to change that one site at a time. Research, planning, engineering then coding. Too many developers (and companies) overlook steps 1-3. But I digress, thanks to a solid year and for reading Smooth Harold.