A few questions that pop up from time to time.

What Technologies do you use?

We generally believe in the best tool for the job, but our usual toolkit includes FreeBSD or Solaris on the server side, Ruby on Rails on the application server side, with a smattering of PHP and perl here and there. We primarily use MySQL for the database backend.

Depending on the project we may integrate stuff like Amazon’s S3, Google Maps and Feedburner.

If the project isn’t functionally as complex (like social networks generally are), we may just use Wordpress. Matt Mullenweg’s a smart guy and they’re doing cool stuff over there. In fact, the Polycot Labs site itself is built on Wordpress.

On the systems side of things we’re a Mac shop, with a few PCs for testing purposes.

What size of projects do you do?

We tend to focus on fewer larger projects rather than a bunch of smaller ones for a few reasons, namely we can provide more personalized service, we can implement more advanced technologies, and we have more budget for polish. Generally our development projects run between $15k and $100k for the first phase, with most falling around the middle of that range. Analysis projects run between $2.5k and $15k.

Do you work with mostly local clients or remote clients?

It’s about 50/50, actually. We have clients on both coasts and here in Austin, and we love them all. We’ve found that it’s a lot easier to do these days with iChat AV and Skype, but we still regularly do face to face meetings with remote clients, especially in the project definition phase.

Do you do visual design?

We don’t have any professional graphic designers in-house, typically what we’ll do is either work with a clients existing designer or find a designer that fits the project and connect the client with them. We’ll be involved in the Information Architecture phases and help create wireframes and process flows, and provide feedback on design elements that work and don’t work.

For designers or design firms who have the ability to take the Photoshop or Illustrator designs and turn them into standards compliant HTML and CSS we’re happy to accept tested template from them, or we can do that piece.

Very occasionally we’ll do a site design in-house (the site you’re looking at was designed in house), but we have no illusions about winning any design awards.