The Perch Registered Developer Programme

Yesterday we launched our new Perch Registered Developer Programme. This is open to any individual freelancer or company who develops sites using Perch. Our aim is to promote companies who use Perch and also to provide a listing for people who are looking for someone to build a site or Perch add-on. In this way we hope the network will be beneficial to the members but also to the entire community.

The benefits of membership include

Membership costs £120 per year (plus VAT if applicable) and you can sign up and join online.

Since we launched the programme we’ve had a really positive response – and also some questions, so this post is really to discuss our thinking behind the programme and how it will benefit our Perchers – the people who develop sites using Perch, us as a company and a product and also the end clients.

How will this benefit designers and developers who use Perch?

The listing on the Perch website we really see as the main benefit if you are a business offering websites built using Perch. We increasingly have people contacting us looking for someone to either build and design an entire site, or developing a custom app on top of Perch. The listing will give us somewhere to point those people. £120 is really great value for a year-long targeted advert on a busy site.

As more companies sign up to the programme we will look at how to filter that listing so that everyone is findable. We really want you all to benefit as much as possible from this.

If you are interested in Perch development then getting early access to beta versions of Perch and/or add-ons may be helpful to you and obviously getting a discount on all licenses bought will, for some of you, mean that you actually make back the cost of the programme over the course of a year in discounts!

How does this benefit Perch?

Firstly we want to be able to support our community of Perchers and the clients who use Perch, so this is just one way to do that.

Secondly, while we’ll never stop asking the wider community for ideas and opinions on Perch features, there are times when having a small group of experienced users to talk to is helpful. When things are at an early stage and we don’t want to widely announce them for example. So the developer programme gives us a chance to run things by a smaller group of experienced Perchers, before making ideas more public.

How will this benefit end clients?

As time passes we get more people getting in touch with us for the following reasons:

Having a page on the site listing people and companies who can help will be a great starting point for people in their search for a designer or developer who knows Perch well.

We hope that you like the idea and you don’t need to have built hundreds or even tens of Perch sites to benefit. If you are someone who likes working with Perch and would like to use it more – then this is a way to advertise your availability.