There comes a time when you want to explore alternate web options, who doesn't. The market is booming with ideas and concepts for online applications and sites and you may try to get your feet wet and get involved. But before any of that, you need to ask a few questions:

1. Will I use this framework to it's full potential?

Most frameworks have a vast community that can provide you with answers to solve even the most complex problems. Turning to the wiki or forums can help to shed some light on an issue and often point you in an alternate direction for achieving the desired result in a faster and more efficient manner.

Using frameworks such as Yii, Ruby on Rails, Joomla, Drupal all have their advantages with the community developing plugins, modules or add-ons that can help extend the functionallity of your site or application without having to develop your site from scratch.

2. Have I selected a framework that can handle my business model?

Not just talking about classes and functions that are included within a framework, but thinking ahead and determining whether or not your application will be able to handle 2000 requests at one time.

Take into consideration how each framework optimises for speed and accessibility, especially if you are planning to develop an online community of your own.

It doesn't have to be another Facebook or Twitter, but if you make yourself informed at the beginning of the process, you will have less headaches later on.

3. Is my framework complicating jobs that should be simple?

You may want to create something as simple as a website with a contact form. Piece of cake, right? But then you want to have access to a view that shows a database with all stored contact information so that you can also manually add new details and enquries to as you go along.

Using a framework like Joomla to setup something like this is something that we used to do. It allowed for extensions if needed and we could integrate some really great components for the contact form from the Joomla community.

Spending the time to learn a new framework is invaluable. Developing something like this in Yii, CakePHP or CodeIgniter is not only faster, but the footprint of the framework is much smaller meaning quicker load times and far less work on your part to get the project completed.

Make sure to determine where you aim to be in 3 months, 12 months, 3-5 years from now to better understand your requirements. In many cases, a custom framework that you develop can be better off when needing to scale from the ground up.

If the learning curve is too steep, please feel free to contact us to help you create a solution that is cost effective and efficient for your next online project.