We only build websites that make business sense. We're looking for clients that will keep coming back to us to enhance their sites as we help them to grow. Our clients come back to us because they see more leads, more sales, better customer service and/or improved operational efficiency from every project successfully completed. So if you just want a buzzword compliant site, find a developer that needs the work. We're only interested if we can help you to make more money, cut your costs and/or improve your customer service - it's just how we work.
We always start projects by clarifying your business intent - why bother building the site? Often we have clients asking for one thing and needing another. There was a client recently who asked us to build them a blog. When we asked why, it eventually came down to generating more traffic (via Search Engine Optimization) to create more leads. A quick look at their landing page for converting interest into inquiries showed that driving more people to such an uninspiring page would just increase the number of people who would never do business with them in the future! Instead we helped them to improve their landing pages and to implement multi-variate testing on their headline, copy and offer. Now that they're converting interest more efficiently, we're helping them to drive more traffic and to support their positioning as industry experts with the blog they originally asked for.
Another client wanted real time integration between their store and their back end inventory system. After a brief discussion it became clear that their stock lead times were short enough that they wanted to accept orders even if they were out of stock so they could capture the sale. We saved them thousands of dollars in programming while increasing the number of orders they could capture just by looking at their underlying needs and removing an unnecessary feature from the spec.
Even if you have a pretty good idea of your objectives, by taking an hour or two upfront, we can make sure that we're focusing on the activities that will provide you with the best return on investment. We also use the business intent as a guideline while developing the site to ensure that we focus on designing an application that will achieve your organizational objectives.
If you need more help with clarifying your objectives, you might also want to consider a short consulting engagement first.
November 14, 2007 - New website launched! We've still got some work to do on the look and feel, but we wanted to get the message out ASAP - we're officially open for (new) business.
October 25, 2007 - Just finished presenting our solution at ooPSLA in Montreal.