What excuse is there for a web development agency not to have a website? Well...several come to mind, but none of them are really valid. A strong web presence for a web development company (like us) is just not negotiable. I've lost count of the number of times I was asked for our web address and I would respond with a hasty, "uh we're busy with some upgrades and...". Inexcusable. Um, we'll save the business card issue for another post.

So we decided to build ourselves a website. We treated the development of our company website just as we would treat a partner project. In a nutshell, we:

• wrote a project and creative brief
• profiled the users who would visit our site
• created user stories
• set-up the project within our project management platform and allocated the resources
• wire framed all the sections of this site
• reviewed, tested and then published a development version.

I wrote this on a soft-launched version of the website. In our project management process, when a project is soft-launched, it means that there is no release tag. It's a development version, taken from our version control trunk, that has been published. This is not ideal, yet acceptable in certain circumstances.

When it's OK to publish a development version of a project

Our website does not have many readers at the time of writing this. You may be one from the 60 or so appreciated people that stop by here. There has been no official release and no publicity. During this phase we iron out the creases and check the spelling. Additionally, I wanted to get what we had out and published, so that our company could have some point of reference that people voting for sessions at DrupalCon San Francisco, could use to find out more about us. I submitted a session proposal.

Growing with our vision and a sense of belonging

The domain name mojahmedia.com has been around since 2001. The incarnation prior to this was a stock standard Garland theme on a Drupal site never updated. Oy. We've been working mainly on in-house stuff since setting up shop in Argentina. Two of our web startups are doing very well. And now we want to expand. We have a small team. Expansion means that each of us takes on leadership roles as we bring in new energy into our collective.

I would like to branch away from all the operational activities that have been taking up most of my time and focus more on creating new relationships and bringing in new people into our group. The thing is though, I really enjoy design and code and making all the bits and pieces dance. I'll probably get my fix with pet projects. Everyone has pet projects right?

Mauro and Mariano are being guided towards becoming inspired leaders. They've both got heart, talent, dedication and loads of Drupal experience. Cecilia will continue to take care of the social networking thing and community management of our startups.  We are just about happy with our project management setup and workflow processes and we may just start doing some outside commercial work. We're more interested in creating products based on Drupal rather than developing custom websites. We're presently working on a student recruitment/relationship platform. The first version of it has been running super successfully since 2007 even though its so clunky. The next version (which we are all deeply involved in) is taking shape into something not unlike the Bistromath. It's light years ahead of what we did in 2007.

Having a space on this virtual place is grounding. It gives us a sense of belonging. We've even started to use Twitter and Facebook and things like that. I kinda like Twitter.

What about you? Where are you at with your enterprise?