I have a website that I run in the UK that was voted the one of the best sports sites by Emap Pursuit Publishing Readers.

The website has been programmed in php and I need to find a company that are very well regarded to work with the existing developer to take to a next stage. Ie have a proven track record.

How does one of about finding a php software house that is based either in London or UK, as everyone from a programming point of view we have meet would like us to scrap our website and move us to Microsoft.net.

My concern is the site has had over 1000+ hours prgramming and needs improvement and I would prefer to improve it rather than scrap what we have done ourselves.

First of all, don't even think about switching over to .NET, stick with PHP.

There are many places to find programmers, try a google search for PHP jobs or something like that, it will probably link you to most of the major sites. There is also a section on www.php.net which has a few links to PHP job sites. Also, there is an employment offers and requests forum here on WHT, you may want to try making a post in it.

First of all, don't even think about switching over to .NET, stick with PHP.


I second this. Not because PHP is a great language, but because a rewrite is completely unnecessary. Personally I think PHP sucks, but it's the best we've got for certain situations.

Any company that refuses to take on the project because they refuse to work with PHP is either a graduate sweat shop with a programmer base consisting entirely of drones who know a single language.

If you keep hearing them suggest a rewrite for architectural reasons, however, you may be better off (in the long term) with a rewrite: 1000+ hours of development time on a web site is plenty of time for architectural rot to set in. And in a language like PHP, where many people who practise it fail to practise good software development techniques, this may very well be the case.

or perhaps learn .NET as a side language im already a ophp programmer but im still learning .net

Did they give any reason for switching to .net? Or are they just saying that because that's all they know?

I don't know about the UK market, but if you are open to european developers; I know of a few that can help you out.

The main reason they would like us to switch is they know .net and have most of the it systems in place that we need as they are a London developer. What I am finding here in UK is there are very few companies that advertise that they do ie php now.

Yes there are advantages in switching to dot net, but when you see sites like firebox.com I suppose I am not keen to change.

The problem I have is the programmer that helps us with this site has learnt doing the project. Some of what he has done is great in terms of search engine placement. Other things need to be improved.

For ie £10,000 most of the problems I have can be fixed as the site need between 3/4 weeks work to finish off.

I can have the whole site rebuilt for about £20,000 if I call in a favour in .net.

You should pretty much always improve what you have instead of rewriting. All the existing code is proven to work, whereas new stuff never does first time.

You can refactor code easily, reuse huge chunks of it, and then add in the new features you want.

I would also be wary of migrating to a new platform, I doubt you'll continue to use the MySQL database your PHP code probably uses, the new developers will be coding against SQLServer, and so your hosting costs will go up.

Like Matthew said, there is a forum here on WHT that handles employment requests.. perhaps someone in that forum could be who you need to handle your problem.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=33

At present the site gets 2,000,000 pages a month, has 20,000 members that give us Name, Address and Telephone number that can walk into our combined online shop. If anyone is interested I will send the web address via im, but I did not really wish to post it here.

To answer your question the original programmers that built my site I found through webhostingtalk.com. Back then there were just 13,000 members. They cost me £5000.00 which I paid and what they left me with was rubbish from a coding point of view. Its taken me to years to recover and cost me £300,000 in lost sales a minimium figure!

I suppose what I wanted from you guys was a list companies that specialise in php that have created some complex ecommerce plateforms in the UK.

If I could find the programmers of firebox.com that would be interesting.