Going with the boy genius isn't always what it's cracked up to be.

A lot of people who want a webpage will often end up going via what can be referred to as the "brother-in-law's nephew route." Sure, it sounds all jolly at the time, but it usually comes back to bite you in the end (guess which end). It goes something like this:

Bob wants a website. Dave, Bob's best friend for the last 20 years, has a [______]^[1] — "Norbert, I think his name was" — who is going to college or university, taking comp sci, and would just LOVE to do something like that so he can get some experience and have it to put in his portfolio. He's smart as a whip and, because he's a student, he'll work dirt cheap. Bob thinks that's a great idea and besides, he's known Dave for years. Dave's judgment can be trusted.

And so, Norbert goes to work on the site. He works like a plough horse, coding tirelessly into the wee hours of the morning, for weeks on end. His eyes get bags under them, he loses pounds he never had to spare, and people start to worry about him.

Because he wants this to be a showcase for the full extent of his not-insignificant capabilities, he codes everything from scratch. His attention to detail would give Stephen Hawking a bad case of brain-itch, his determination puts a bloodhound to shame and his work ethic makes Winston Churchill look like some hippie slacker. Finally, after countless hours of toil, sweat and blood, his Magnum Opus is ready to be unveiled to the world.

And, whaddaya know, the damned thing is absolutely awesome.

Dynamic content, presented in flawless graphics and powered by intuitive menus, flows down the line on the narrowest of bandwidths seamlessly to the client computer to any browser you can imagine, where it used only the barest sliver of resources. The server barely even notices that it's being used. Norbert's geek friends are in awe, his prof stops making fun of him and the kinky redhead who works in the server room even contemplates mating with him (nobody saw that one coming). Life is good for Norbert and Bob has one hell of a website. Everything's good.

Good, that is, until sometime down the road, when Bob's business moves to a new location and starts offering three hot new lines of products (totally cool stuff, really) and he needs to have the site updated. Bob tries to get ahold of Norbert to do the updates, but Norbert's working bug fixes at Micro$oft now, and has developed a 40-can-a-day Jolt®'n'Red Bull® habit so he can work the 70 hours a week he needs to cover the alimony he has to pay to his gold-digging, redhead ex-wife after she ran off with the cable-monkey. There's no way he's going to be able to find the time to update that site.

So, Bob tries to contract out for the job. Dozens of coders put in for the contract, but Norbert's opus of über-geekery was written without any commentary whatsoever and nobody is able to make heads or tails out of the thousands of lines of spaghetti logic that went into it.

Bob is stuck with a totally awesome website ... that he can't do a damned thing with. Sucks to be Bob.

Fortunately, this won't ever happen to any of our clients, for a very simple reason: we only use established, well known web applications, that have not only been proven tried and true, but are also familiar to literally millions of nerds the world over. We could all get hit by a bus tomorrow and our clients would be able to find someone who can fill in for us, if they need to.

Even if someone chooses to go with the most complex product we offer, or needs an alteration that can't be done through the back-end interface, there are going to be plenty of geeks out there that can get the job done quickly and efficiently, because it's all standardized.

No one gets left in the lurch with us. We like it that way.

Notes, anyone?
1 — Son, nephew, second cousin eight times removed's former babysitter's dog walker... whatever. You get the idea.