Macronimous – 20 Glorious years of offshore web development  

Benny November 15, 2022 0 comments

Well, we are here, 20 Years & Counting!

Let me first give you a heads-up! This is going to be a lengthy blog, loaded with nostalgic thoughts on Tech, primarily. The reason being very obvious, that we have crossed 20 long years in web development. I believe you will enjoy this, especially if you are in the IT industry for decades.

It was a rainy Monday in November 2002. Rain starts in October in South India and gets intensified in November. Macronimous – the name coined from the Word Macro + Magnanimous came into reality. Web development was still very new, less than 5 years old! Most businesses did not even know the importance of web development. Macronimous wanted to do offshore web development from India. The challenge was we needed business owners to trust us without seeing each other. But it happened gradually and gracefully.

This is a very short story about us. We thought we should capture it in words as we reach 20 years old next month, November 2022.

20 years with worldwide customers

Doing business online was very new to small businesses worldwide. After the dot com bubble in 2000, the word ECommerce was not only techie but a bit scary too. Buying with a credit card on a website was not a welcoming idea. Only a few sites like eBay, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble existed. It was not easy to enter into ECommerce website development. But we built some simple catalogs to complete Mobile based stores. More about that while reading below, a little further.

Business owners in the USA and a few European countries started looking for outsourcing their web development work to India. Some businesses went ahead already and started setting up remote teams outside their country. After a few months to a year of initial challenges, we at Macronimous were able to win clients’ hearts.

One UK company went ahead of engaging us for all their web projects. Right from the design conception till development and finally continued with continuous maintenance. We did some of the major web development projects with them, which still exists. After that Our customer base extends from a wide array of nations – USA, UK, German, and Australia – to name a few.

20 years of client confidence

Quick communication through Emails, reading their requirements in detail, delivering what they want at the very first iteration – thus minimizing the communication! These are all some qualities that learned at our very early stages. We believed that websites must be a gateway to bring more business to our customers. They are not just web presence – But, business gateways.

Learning technology daily, and applying it the right way to make better websites and web applications with value additions helped us to ace. Some of our customers have become our associates. This means they started giving their many web projects to us. Many clients are repeated clients. Some will us for more than 17 years. One of our clients visited us 17 times within 10 years, to work closely with the developer, manage projects, and have to make road trips that we accompany. It is not just offshore web development, it is a win-win relationship based on trust and exchanging love!

Once we get to know each other – that is within a project or even within a few days, many of our clients have become our friends. We have never met them once, and the relationship is strong. Even in the age of video conferencing, some clients have not shown their faces. This is a strange fact.

20 years with technology

Offshore web development was in the early stages in India, we hardly had internet connectivity which was less than 30 KBPS. Yes, you read it right. Kilo Bytes per second. Comparing the internet speed that we have in India (300MBPS at our workplace), what we had was nothing. Dial-up internet was funny and painful at times. A few hundred bytes would take an eternity to upload. We had to sit late at night to FTPing completed websites to get better speed. Internet was shared so, we were waiting for the Indian public to go to sleep.

 

Dynamic web pages were created with Active Server Pages (ASP). Which was a very simple scripting language until we found PHP. We built a simple Content Management system (CMS) with ASP and MS Access, later it was moved to an MS SQL server. We provided a simple editing interface with that CMS to many of our customers who wanted to change content frequently. It was a heart-winning solution until we found WordPress.

We used MIDP 2.0 API to build a B2B ECommerce store that was running only in Symbian-based simple handsets in 2005. Now we call them ‘Feature phones!’ The site had everything that eBay has now. Java and Java ME were used in full swing afterward.

Macronimous was also a pioneer in, App development for handheld smart devices. Between 2003 and 2007 we built several apps and products for Windows CE handhelds and Palm OS devices. Those technologies were very in the early stages but missed one key feature. A smooth touch experience and connectivity! iPhone solved that issue – and a new era of smartphones arrived. Remember pages? Like that, handheld devices, or PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) short-lived and died infants.

However, within that short period, we didn’t miss the opportunity to help clients to enable mobility. We even owned a separate business website, PDAEnable.com.

PDA or handheld app development lived only a short period, met dusk when smartphones dawned. 

However, We had to invest already in several PDA devices including Tungsten, HP, Dell, etc. We didn’t want to throw away those devices to garbage – so they are laying on a shelf and bring smiles when we look at them, the past.

20 years of team building

We are a client-driven company. Many clients helped us to grow by bringing new challenges. New challenges mean new learning. The new process as well new technics and technology. Simple HTML to large-scale applications were built by our team of experts. It all started as a single full-stack developer in 2002. You are right, there was no phrase for a full-stack developer – But One person had to do everything from requirement analysis to delivery and maintenance.

But things changed when clients trusted us and started giving web projects and mobile apps. Resulting in a development team of professionals who are willing to learn and grow. We are proud to say, though we were small, we were able to provide a very good environment to learn cutting-edge technologies, tools, and technics to our developers. While some of our developers and designers are still with us, many are working at top-notch companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. We are happy to help them grow, and we were happy to support them in building their personal lives too.

20 years of SEO and Offshore web development

The words “offshore web development” and “outsource web development” were introduced by my boss Ralph to me during the late 90s. We found them as our Search keywords and started SEO. Macronimous continued to be on top of searches for the last two decades with that keyword. We are pioneers in SEO. Some of our SEO team members are doing SEO even before Google was born. We learned SEO through Yahoo search Directory, DMOZ, Alta vista, and other search engines. We continue to learn algorithms and helped hundreds of clients to be on top of Google SEO.

Google was a 2-year-old Baby. Google used Yahoo Directory for a short period. Working closely with the Yahoo directory helped SEOs to manage Google ranking. Then Google moved to DMOZ, and some of us were editors in DMOZ for the local area. This Dmoz was a very busy search directory, sadly, it is dead.

 

All these have been replaced by Google’s powerful algorithms, and Google slowly started growing and becoming a giant. Until a decade ago, Google needed SEO professionals to make websites ready, and we helped them grow. Then Google algorithms became powerful, especially Panda. Our SEO team learned that it is going to be SEO 2.0! Ever since we realized this, our entire learning of SEO is almost become void and needs a fresh start. Now SEO industry started depending on Google!

20 years of Great clientele 

It is a joy to come to know one day that a client referring to a book stated they found our name in it. The book name of The New Small by Phil Simon. We came to know Phil interviewed some of our clients and they had given our name and spoke highly of us. Another client once said that it took almost a year to find us as their Web development partner in India. They interviewed around 20 companies and finally selected Macronimous as their India development associate. 

Now we have a great portfolio of several thousand websites. We helped them with website redesign to web application refactoring. WAP-based websites to All new Mobile-first websites. Database migration to data cleansing and database optimization. Application security to continuous website maintenance. We had been depending on our well-SEOed website Macronimous.com for new web projects. But, some of our clients joyfully recommended us and helped us to build more and more web projects. Without them, such a great portfolio wouldn’t have been possible.

I hope you enjoyed this read. This should be an interesting throwback or a nostalgic thought which was driven by technology and clients. Let us know your comments.