Strategy & Planning
We don’t presume to know your business, but we know ours.
What are your goals, what problems are you trying to solve? More site visitors? Increased revenue? Improved user experience? Efficient workflows? Updated design? Better performance? New functionality…?
Whatever your business, no one understands it better than you. Before we can provide you with effective and efficient services we need to understand your business as well as you do.
We will analyze your processes, workflows, challenges and goals. We’ll make suggestions based on our experience and insights. We are mindful of costs and will help you determine feasible options based on your budget and can recommend an optimal phased approach if needed.
We offer technical design and analysis as a separate consulting service. We can prepare detailed requirements that you can use to solicit additional bids from other web development companies.
There is no substitute for planning. Shortcuts always cost more in the long run. Leverage our skills and experience to thoroughly analyze your goals and present detailed strategies and solutions.
Design
An effective design bridges the gap between your ideas and your goals.
We work hands-on with our clients to design optimal user experiences that produce results. It’s crucial to not only understand your goals but also the site user’s needs and priorities. We strategically design websites that are intuitive and streamlined allowing users to easily navigate and find what they’re looking for with minimal clicks and page loads.
Proper planning and organization are just as important as the eye-catching layouts that give your users confidence in your website.
Rather you’re looking to design a new project from the ground-up or redesign an existing project we can work with you each step of the way to design an experience that produces results.
WordPress Development
We have a wide range of experience with WordPress from simple brochure websites to high-traffic, content-heavy, publishing platforms. We leverage WordPress’ vast catalog of existing components to efficiently build e-commerce and membership sites, and sites integrated with third-party services.
It’s worth doing right. All of our WP sites are designed and built using standards-based best practices with security, sustainability and scalability front of mind.
WordPress site performance is also critical. We pay particular attention to search engine optimization, optimized images and page structure, page load times, clean code, etc.
In addition to building fully custom WordPress themes we also have experience selecting pre-built marketplace themes that lower development costs and time when a fully custom project is not necessary.
Ecommerce
Got something to sell? One of a kind items or a warehouse full of stuff? Owning your own storefront is a better solution than using a cloud-hosted service and is much more within your reach than you may think.
Cloud-hosted shopping cart services have recurring monthly fees, typically have limited features, limited design options and often lock you in to using their credit card processor.
Owning the store does require an upfront investment but this gives you full control over your data, unlimited functionality, the design can be anything you want seamlessly integrated with your website and you have many credit card processor options.
A WordPress website with a WooCommerce shopping cart is a very cost-effective and robust option to sell anything you want online. WooCommerce is a mature suite of extendable commerce tools that can be used to sell physical products, digital products, online access, services, memberships, subscriptions… the world is your oyster.
Our experience with WooCommerce ensures you’ll get a streamlined checkout process that is easy and convenient for your customers, an intuitive storekeeper backend to manage inventory and order fulfillment, and integrated shipping tools that automatically print shipping labels and tracking numbers.
Custom Applications
Need something outside the box? We also build completely custom solutions when pre-existing platforms like WordPress aren’t the best option. If you have very specific needs a custom purpose-built application may meet your goals better than more general platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.
For example, we were asked to complete the integration and setup of a membership plugin on an existing WordPress site. There are several existing membership plugins that are very robust but not up to the challenge of the client’s unique membership requirements and large membership list. After careful consideration we determined the best option was a tailor-made application that met the client’s precise needs. We’ve done similar projects for custom ecommerce systems, high-volume newsletter applications and integrations with 3rd party systems.
Hosting
Most web developers outsource their website hosting (some of them outsource to us). Website hosting is in our blood; we’ve been running our own servers since 2008 and we have our own in-house server admins.
Your website hosting shouldn’t be an afterthought for you or your development partner. Hosting your site on our servers means you’ll get 5-star treatment. We pay particular attention to uptime, page load time, site security and data integrity.
And speaking of… our highest priority is protecting your data. It doesn’t matter how fast your site loads, or your 99.99% uptime guarantee if you don’t have data integrity. Our standard service includes daily backups, daily/weekly/monthly backup retention and offsite backups. We don’t take for granted that these automated systems are infallible so we consistently check they are working and verify the integrity of your data.
We have a hosting plan for everyone, from simple brochure websites that can be hosted on a shared server to high-traffic sites with multiple dedicated servers. Most of our hosting clients are small business with a cost-effective hosting package tailored to their specific needs.
And we offer an a la carte selection with all the trimmings… content delivery networks to deliver your pages faster, application firewalls to keep your site secure, load balancers for smooth operations and disaster recovery environments that are ready to take over if the primary hosting environment fails for any reason (any reason, use your imagination).
Maintenance & Support
No website is set-and-forget. Website technology is continually evolving and there are bugs that need to be fixed, security holes that need to be patched, and underlying technologies get feature updates. If your site is not regularly maintained it becomes vulnerable to newly discovered security holes and the more outdated the code becomes, the more difficult it is to do updates when needed.
We offer service agreements that keep your site updated and patched, or we can perform these tasks as-needed. We also offer ongoing training and support for the people who use and manage your website. We’re never far away.
Branding
We don’t specialize in branding but we have the in-house skills to do good branding when needed, and do it when it makes sense. The typical scenario is when a new business doesn’t have a brand and needs a website. You can see some examples of our branding on our case studies page, if you need a brand and these resonate with you, let’s discuss.
And, the services we don’t offer:
We stick to things we’re good at and are a good fit with our skills so we don’t offer marketing, social media management, content creation, graphic design, print design, copywriting, animation, photography or videography. If any of these services are needed for your project we’ll help you find a good partner.