While this is not always possible, or what you desire (in which case we will go with what you want) we prefer to establish and work with you within a flexible partnership-based approach, which in our experience maximises value for money:

• We establish a relationship of community between ourselves, your organisation and any other partners
• such that skills and inputs from all sides are managed and brought together in an alignment
• which empowers and supports us all to fulfil your objectives through the web site.

A partnership-based approach ideally starts from your budget, and then seeks to provide you with the maximum amount of functionality consistent with the budget.

Creating Value for Money

By working with a product like TYPO3 which is both powerful, flexible and extensible we are nearly always in a position in which we could, in principle, do more than you would be willing to pay for, or, on the other hand, we can implement off-the-shelf solutions which need not cost much at all, and which are inevitably more stereotyped, or require you to put in more work. We are therefore well placed to work with you to arrive at a solution which spends your budget, and no more than your budget, in the way that gives you the best possible value for money - whether this involves us in taking the whole problem off your back, working with high quality and therefore expensive designers and copy writers, and then continuing to manage the system once it is on-line, or whether you simply want a pre-built solution for your small organisation, plus pointers to where the documentation is, so that you can manage it yourself; or if, of course, like most organisations, you are somewhere in-between.

In an ideal project, where we start from the beginning, this is what we do to ensure value for money:

• work with you from an early stage to establish what your objectives are, and how a web site can best realise them.
• making value for money a major priority at all stages of our projects
• allowing you (or indeed, others) to contribute as much or as little as you wish to the design, engineering and on-going management of your website
• providing whatever training you need to allow you to take on whatever your input will be - thereby reducing long-term costs.
• providing, or having available on the web, documentation and tutorials for the system, so that you can teach yourself in your own time if you prefer to do this (or simply don't have the money to do it any other way)
• being available to support you as you learn to use your site
• avoiding locking you into proprietary solutions (and saving you money) by using open source software.
• ensuring that you can take your custom elsewhere, by using a system which has built-in portability, and providing you with the means to backup your whole site to a local computer for transfer to another server.
• ensuring that your investment is future-proofed, and can be developed by working with powerful, flexible, feature-rich and extensible server-side software, which is almost certainly already capable of far more than you need, and is actively being developed.
• enabling you to manage all your own content from any internet-connected computer, any time, anywhere in the world. 
• making it possible for you to change the appearance of all or part of your site as and when you wish to display existing content differently.
• TYPO3 empowers you to use any suitable page layout(s), which you can design yourself, buy in from the web, have designed, or get Gate Seven to design.
• We can usually take over the design of any existing static web site you have.

Competitive Quotations

Most organisations need to seek competitive quotations as part of their procurement process.

Basic to any competitive process is the principle that the work being tendered for is specified in advance. Having a functional specification is one of the most powerful tools in arriving at value for money, and the production of specifications is one of the paid-for services we offer.

A partnership-based specification will most likely draft the specification in terms of:

• what you want to achieve
• will be clear what your budget is
• invite tenders on the basis of what the companies concerned can achieve within the budget.

Such a formulation starts you off in a frame of reference in which you can co-operate with your supplier, look for creative solutions to problems, as and when they emerge, and look to develop the site further as and when funds allow.

This doesn't mean we would expect you to sign a vague contract, nor that you should leave no budget for contingencies: it is in everyone's interests that the outcomes to be achieved are clearly specified, and that issues such as limits on revisions and included and additional work are clear. However, separating out the definition and quotation processes puts you in a better position to get value for money, because then your potential suppliers will all be quoting for the same work.