I like your ideas for development of govt-friendly apps. But I suspect the reality is they'd be difficult to sell in: different strokes for different folks, clients at very different stages of adoption and so on. You could find yourself spending lots of energy on sales and marketing when you'd be better responding to individual needs and developing bespoke tools like you have been doing. But sharing, licensing and re-using elements where you can is a good thing. Continuing to blog about the stuff you've made and talking at informal gatherings of gov webbies seems as good a way as any of doing this.

I don't think seeking commercial clients would necessarily weaken your government expertise credentials. (Political work might muddy the waters though). I think the Puffbox brand is about socially responsible, web software development for the public good - using the best of agile, open source publishing platforms (i.e. WP) to save public money, empower the client to be less reliant on the big firms, and increase accountabilty/transparency. Potentially by extension, you could do the same for SME and 3rd sector.

Good for you for crowdsourcing this by the way!

1) You put your finger on it with:

It's a shift from 'look what we can do' to 'how can we do it properly?'. A realisation that high-profile sites really can't rely on individual developers, no matter how multi-talented

The market is ready for agencies which offer WordPress-as-default-platform solutions as part of a full service. In fact, I'm already detecting a change in the agencies I speak to. But pretty quickly, working as a network of associates, you need to have a project management process and culture which gives clients confidence in the format and flexibility which is and isn't possible when working with you. In other words, you need to standardise on some processes, milestones and deliverables that make life bearable for both clients and colleagues - I learned that from the evolution of my previous employer into a big agency.

2) Develop say 3 core products which are customisable flavours of general tools based on WordPress. I'd vote for a consultation platform, an event aggregation platform, and an idea submission/discussion engine. Don't work up any of them too much, but make sure there's a solid basic package for each you can roll out with a customised skin rapidly and cheaply.

3) Sort out hosting. Find a LAMP guru or team and a reliable infrastructure provider, based in the UK, able to answer the tough questions of IT security officers confidently. Corporate/government clients are much less price sensitive than consumers when it comes to hosting but demand reliability and guarantees that the necessary patches will be applied as needed in the future. Work up a retainer model for maintenance and offer it as part of every proposal.

I say this to you here, because you asked, but of course I'd say pretty much the same things to anyone

Ultimately going from one man, working alone and hiring others in to being an actual company was a painful step for me. OK, I moved from ERP systems (with web front ends) to the web dev world and that alone was a massive step.

As a business we would, in the early days, do anything that came up. Consequently our commitments were all over the place and it cost us dearly. Once we focussed on WordPress, things improved because we had only one set of problems to worry about. Then we focussed on sectors (in our case Enterprise + News & Media) and that improved things again. What we're now doing is developing packaged solutions for the sectors in which we're establishing a name where we can use our understanding of their problems to make life better, but at lower cost. There seems to be strong interest in this, with key decision makers popping up all the time.

So what you're thinking of, there, is something similar - and I think it's probably the best way to get growth in your company. It also helps move you away from being a pure service company.

Good luck, whatever direction you choose!

Making the business case for profoundly cheaper website development could be enormously productive in local government allied to a push for sites built on the same basis that business sites are, for example spending lots more on testing/research than they currently do.

Simon, more engagement with the problems of local government by you, with your history and, dare I say it, cred, would be invaluable.