A couple weeks back, I noticed a piece in the Biz Journal feed about a web development firm called Site9 moving its corporate headquarters to Portland. I’ve never heard of them and from what I could tell they didn’t look that big to even need a corporate headquarters. But, that’s cool to have another web shop in town, no harm there. Now, they’ve gone and raised some money. Again good for them, I’m happy to see people get a chance to build a business.

But, a couple of things struck me as a bit off. I don’t really understand this software they need money to develop. Pre-built, pluggable modules? Seems like a tough market, as “automatic integration” into an existing website is a pipe dream (though many businesses could very well like to learn this the hard way) and using them to build a site from the ground up is a questionable approach. For proprietary, little-used technology, it would be difficult to find somebody to maintain your site, but I guess Site9, like any good drug dealer (I mean web agency) will surely maintain it for you.

Then they go and try to attach themselves to web 2.0:

“The Web site design and Web 2.0 software development firm”

Hmmm, ok, if you say so. Seems like a questionable use of Web 2.0 that contributes to its derision in cynic circles. Finally there’s this:

“Next-generation features like social networking, podcasting, video-on-demand, RSS feeds, AJAX interfaces and blogs are integrated into the tool.”

A little buzzword happy are we? I mean, c’mon where are the tags? And the APIs? And mashups? How can you be a Web 2.0 software development company without those? 🙂

I wish them luck, but I think their marketing needs some tuning. But, who knows, maybe it works, cuz it got me to blog about it.