Website Design & Development

Web development is the term normally used to refer to all the "back-end stuff" when creating a website. This can be anything that isn’t visual design, from complex custom programming to website architecture. For many businesses the functionality of a website and what it actually does is more important than how it simply looks.

Are your website requirements so special and unique that nothing like it has ever been built before? Probably not.

Even large websites with special requirements or complex bespoke functionality are built on top of ideas and frameworks that already exist. The very best things in life leverage other great ideas, and iterate and enhance what has come before.

This means you can achieve advanced and sophisticated results without spending huge amounts of money, but only if your web developer has both knowledge and experience in an existing website framework as well as the ability to provide bespoke customised solutions where necessary.

This is where we believe we add true value and distinguish ourselves from many other web developers. The way we see it, when a client asks a web developer to produce a website one of three outcomes will usually apply:

1. The web developer will leverage a well-known open-source framework or CMS, but with limited knowledge in the proper implementation or customisation of the framework.
2. The web developer will leverage a lesser-known proprietary framework, or will develop everything completely from scratch (usually with an appropriate knowledge of all aspects of the development).
3. The web developer will leverage a well-known open-source framework with detailed knowledge on how to implement it, while customising or developing any bespoke aspects.

No. 1 - will offer to build you a website for peanuts, and if you’re very lucky, may just about achieve what you want.

Think WordPress developers pumping out websites a dime a dozen, usually at low cost and with all kinds of crazy promises around marketing and SEO.

No. 2 - will charge astronomical costs due to proprietary license costs, or the time required to custom code everything (a lot of which is simply re-inventing the wheel).

Think well known agencies with large teams, city centre offices, corporate politics and the inefficiency and waste that adds unnecessary cost.

No. 3 - as you have probably guessed, is us!

Think small and agile, but producing robust, sophisticated solutions with a personalised approach and genuine feeling of responsibility for your website success.

We use a mix of established, well known industry standard frameworks to save time doing things that have been done before to a level that just won’t be improved on unless you have all the time in the world and a bottomless pit of money. When there is something that the framework doesn’t do, no problem, we extend it by custom coding whatever is necessary to achieve the requirements.

Most of our time and effort is spent on ‘site architecture’ as opposed to custom coding. Site architecture is basically modelling your website content requirements, creating fields and building content types, and connecting and configuring different modules and utilities to achieve a specific set of functionality requirements.

Having a detailed knowledge of a sophisticated and robust website framework allows us to achieve the same results as a large web design agency that custom-code everything, but in significantly less time, and therefore at significantly less cost.