Who we are

First contact

First contact is vitally important: it's where we find out about you and where you find out about us.

After all, this is a collaborative process and we both need to be sure that we're the right fit for each other.

Of course it's not all about cost but let's be realistic, the chances are that you'd like to know roughly how much it's all going to cost. The good news is that we're pretty flexible and work with small self funded start-ups through to large organisations and that it's likely we've done something similar before so have a fairly good handle on the scale and effort required.

Design

The first impression you give is the lasting one. All the planning and development effort in the world will come to nothing if the look and feel doesn't engage your users.

Design has a specific place in our process and following the 'Define' stage keeps things simple: we're not looking to figure out new fangled ways of finding content or processing an order because these are nailed down within the Blueprint. At this stage we're only concerned with the visual message which is why it's highly collaborative and involves market research, design variations, client reviews, user acceptance testing and revisions whilst all the time funneling down to a final design.

Build

This is where the tech heads step up to the plate, they've put in the graft during the blueprinting stage and they've listened to far too much 'creative' speak. Now it's their time to shine.

We've worked diligently at requirements gathering and blueprinting, had plenty of meetings and discussions and the creative team have finally stopped talking. Now the developers can get on with laying the foundations by writing the unit tests and utilising one or more of the development tools they know inside out.

Our philosophy: get a working prototype in your hands as early as possible, be nimble and agile in development and project management and above all else, avoid feature bloat.

Test

Testing is core to our development cycle as it forms the basis of our code through the unit tests we write and it provides you with a mechanism for feeding back users' experiences through user acceptance testing.

It's taken years to get right but we think we've perfected our approach with a multi-stage testing policy including 2 key client led phases: getting feedback from you and your users through user acceptance testing (UAT), the results of which may influence changes and tweaks as and when necessary and getting final results from operational readiness testing prior to 'go-live'.

Client testing is not something to dread, we won't be asking you to review bug-ridden or half complete work: we want to inspire confidence which is why our test driven development approach ensures you'll only receive something that has passed unit testing and integration testing by the developer and system testing by our internal QA.

Sustain

It's over right? You've gone live and you're getting really positive feedback, we're all a bit tired but deep down there's a feeling of satisfaction. Is it time to stand back and admire? Not a chance: now is the time to review, analyse and improve. You've taken off but the journey's only just begun.

Firstly there's the 'bedding in' period requiring our immediate attention. This is known as 'early live support' (ELS): we're on hand to deal with issues and bugs, supporting you via telephone, email or through our project management and issue tracking system. We also run infrastructure monitoring tools to catch any critical issues early.

Let's take stock, make tweaks and review SEO and performance usage through Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and server monitoring.

Then let's discuss the second phase functionality that was defined in the blueprint. Is it still valid? Should the phase 2 features be amended based on user feedback? Are there any further enhancements?