In a general sense, I'm asking how small firms that specialise in custom web development for complex apps and sites market themselves successfully when customers often just think they need a 'web design' company.

I work for a small firm with about 15 people and the company is split between doing Software/Database Development (proprietary piece of software we specialise in) and custom web development (based on CodeIgniter/MySQL, some Ruby).

The custom web development started out as websites for customers that already had database development going on with us so it was a lot about integration. Now, almost 10 years later, it stands on its own and I believe we're building quality solutions and have a really good team of people here.

The problem is we compete against companies that build on top of things like Joomla etc where the design details are lost, the functionality is often fudged and the customer never has complete ownership of the system.

But when that is $20k and we are $40k, the customer often doesn't see the value up front. We have however had a number of customers come to us after being stuck with horrible CMS systems that promised all the functionality they wanted but were impossible to use easily and clunky.

In my opinion, we should be emphasising quality, attention to detail, openness (in that we build on open platforms and the customer has the code/database at the end of the day) and technical know-how.

I also wondered whether it'd work better to split off a company just for the web because the a split message is always going to make marketing harder when you're using a single website?

Sorry this is a bit messy, I was basically hoping to hear from people in similar markets about what has worked and what hasn't.