We're in the initial planning stages right now, and we'd like your help. Please share with us in the comment section your experiences with providing information on the web: the good, the bad and the ugly. We want to hear from everyone, no matter how web savvy you are. (In fact, the less savvy, the more useful your experiences will be.) If you have any suggestions for features, we'd love to hear those, too.

Lessons learned should never be undervalued. Although projects may be different, they all contain similar components and attributes.  Looking at each challenge and mistake may be painful; however, practical experience cannot be born from anything else.

Ready to start a project? Often a project involves a slew of stakeholders. Before sitting down with the development team, form a steering committee and do your homework. Start a list identifying goals and objectives. This lays the groundwork for the rest of the project. Begin by assessing the needs of your organization. Look at what is currently lacking and what functionalities should be improved. Most importantly, how can new functionalities or a complete overhaul improve your overall business process and performance?

While evaluating organizational needs, pie in the sky ideas are born and often shut down by budget restrictions. Don't be discouraged, hold on to them and share them with the development team. Believe it or not, we actually thrive on giving you what you really want… even with budget constraints. Never underestimate the power of phased rollouts. Foundations can be built and ready for future plug-ins during the initial release, this cuts down costs that will make your pie in the sky a reality, cheaper!

To sum up, the holistic approach isn't hippie-dippy, it's just good common sense. Don't be afraid to look at, and think about everything.

Here's how it works: if you refer a client to us that we end up working with, we will pay you 5% of the contract value. If you decide to donate that money to a charity, we will double the amount to 10% of the contract value. So, if you help us find a $10,000 contract, you'll get $500. If you decide to donate the money to, say, St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, we'll match your gift for a total of $1,000.

Of course, any program like this has to have a few ground rules. Here are ours:

• It has to be a true referral - you cannot refer yourself. (Besides, you can go blind doing that.)
• If you choose a charity, it must first be approved by us. We don't want to be making donations to "The Human Fund".
• Payments are made to you or your charity within 15 business days of when we receive payment for the contract in question. In most cases, this means you'll wind up getting multiple smaller checks over time.
• We can only offer a single commission per contract. In the event that more than one person refers the same work, we will honor the first referral we receive.

If you are interested in participating, please be sure to become a fan of FirePig on Facebook - that'll help us keep track of everything.

It seems appropriate to open up the blog with an entry about the new site. After two years of operation, we finally decided it was time to eat our own dogfood. The new FirePig site is running on the latest version of Umbraco, open source .NET content management system we recommend to all our clients. It is (of course) a standards-based design, complete with a totally different look when you print the pages - we don't want you to waste all your orange ink. (Go ahead, select "print preview" if you don't believe us.)

So please, take a look around. Then come back here and let us know what you think of the site in the comments section below, or just say "hi" to let us know you were here!