Do No Harm

Many of our clients come to us because their technology is in a horrible state. And sad to say, most of thsoe clients have been deeply burned and wounded by other tech professionals. Some of the biggest problems that we’ve seen:

1. Their systems were set up by a designer – not a developer.
   Designers are critical to the process – they create the look and feel and help shape the visual narrative of your company and your branding. But when it comes to looking at the entire system, often designers draw a blank when it comes to back-end infrastructure.
   We’ve seen it again and again – a web designer thinks that they can handle a huge site, even write some custom code to make it fancy, implement a million plugins to make it work. But without the development and systems architecture background, they can’t assess properly if those plugins will conflict with each other, or if that custom code is going to disappear the next time the client updates their WordPress theme because they haven’t created the proper infrastructure to prevent that (it’s called a “child theme”). Think about it this way – would you hire your cousin Larry (who helped you with your recent kitchen and bathroom remodel) to draft a blueprint for a skyscraper? Or would you hire a first seat violinist to compose and conduct the score for the next Peter Jackson film? They might be able to do it… but you’re taking significant risks.
2. The developer (or designer) overcharged and underdelivered
   Often, we see sites that look ok from the front end, but when you pop the hood and look inside, it’s a bit of a disaster. Often, firms will outsource work through Upwork or Elance, or even Craigslist, without letting you know. They charge you a fortune up front, and then farm out the work to offshore firms. So you’ve wound up paying a small fortune for a site, and they’re generating huge profit, but not double-checking the work that has been done. While we do have team members in other locales, all of them are critical team members with years of experience. We double check all of our code to ensure that it’s of the highest quality and we maintain “clean code” standards. We offer fair and reasonable rates – we’re not the cheapest out there, but we aren’t the most expensive, either. We try to ensure that you are getting the best VALUE for your money. A high quality product at a price that your budget can afford.
   We’ve had clients that paid outrageous sums for sites that literally didn’t work. They had dead links, broken contact forms, or databases in the backend that are a hot mess. We’ve seen code that ceased functioning years ago, and the clients had assurances and guarantees that it would last forever.
3. Developers made promises they just couldn’t – or didn’t want to keep.
   No website is going to last you more than 2 years. Technology moves way too fast. Your website should have basic objectives and goals with solid assessment and analytical tools to measure them. SEO – it’s not about a million meta-tags or having some random things embedded in the site. It’s about having a clean, well-maintained, and regularly updated site with solid content.