Bespoke and inherited systems

We write bespoke systems in PHP, usually where the job is specific to how a business runs: a booking process that has to talk to whatever the office already uses, a system handling a scale of records that ordinary plugins are not built for, or a routine that runs each morning and reconciles what two other systems think is true.

The advantage of building it is that it fits, and it keeps fitting, because it can be changed as the business changes. More than one system we built has been running for twenty years, with upgrades along the way as the technology and the business moved on, and it still belongs outright to the company that paid for it.

We still look after sites built on frameworks that have gone out of fashion, including static HTML and JavaScript, Classic ASP and Lucee. Inheriting one of these is not a problem for us and it is often where we are most useful, because the alternative quote a business usually receives is a full replacement they neither need nor want.

Something old and working is not the same as something broken. Plenty of these systems do their job perfectly well and need maintaining rather than replacing, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a rebuild.

Occasionally it should. Replacement earns its keep when the thing can no longer do something the business now needs, when the technology underneath it has stopped receiving security fixes, or when the cost of keeping it alive has overtaken the cost of starting again. We will tell you which of those applies, and if none of them does, we will say that too.

Tell us what the system does and what you need from it. If nobody at your end knows how it works any more, that is a normal starting position and working it out is the first part of the job.