Front End Development
What’s the difference between a nice looking website and a great user experience? More often than not it’s in the subtle ways that a visitor moves about and interacts with a site, when forms appear only when needed, buttons pulse or react at appropriate times, pages update without having to totally reload, subtle feedback is provided when the user clicks or submits a form. All this contributes towards a seamless, pain-free user experience. Our Front End developers live and breathe the code and techniques that help make websites engaging and a joy to use.
Benefits
- Hand coded, artisan-levels of attention to detail
- Minimal, clean and appropriate uses of code to improve the user experience
Responsive Design
Ever tried to use a website on a smartphone or tablet that forces you to zoom in and scroll about just so you can read the content? Not a great experience is it? Whilst most websites are built to be ‘responsive’, it’s less common to find sites that have been properly considered from a ‘mobile first’ principal. What we mean by this is that if you consider content and functionality to be important no matter what device a user is on, then it makes sense to work and plan from the lowest common denominator first and plan what a user will need from a mobile device first. What’s the most important pieces of content or functionality they need to see on a small mobile screen? Is it that huge, screen sized banner image that everyone seems to think is so important? Possibly not.
We design a site from the ground up to consider how a site may progressively enhance depending on the size of screen a site is being viewed on. The more space we have the more we might be able to show but never at the expense of meaningful information or calls to action.
Benefits
- Works on all devices no matter their screen size
- Designed from a mobile first principle - everyone gets to see the important stuff
- Progressive enhancement enabling a richer user experience on larger screwed devices
Open Source Development
The Open Source Community works together to create software that is freely available to anyone who wants to use it. Nearly all the sites we build use open source Content Management Systems, which means that whilst you are given a website with a powerful, flexible CMS, you don’t pay for any software licensing costs, instead you pay for our expert time to configure and built the site to your exact specification. The added advantage is that if you’re not using proprietary code the less liable you are to being locked into any one agency who’s code you rely on.*
*Myth Buster - Whilst most agencies will try to tell you that developing in an open source CMS will enable your project to be immediately portable or easy for a third party to pick up and leave off from a previous developer, the truth is a little less clear cut. The very nature of open source software is that it is exceptionally flexible and is designed to be customised around your and the developers own specific needs. It’s extremely rare to find a website that is built using an out of the box install of an open source CMS system that hasn’t been bent out of shape to accommodate specific needs and functionality. In reality, it can be a tricky process to find a developer who would be prepared to take on someone else's open source CMS and carry on developing on it.
Benefits
- Cost effective, no initial or ongoing licence fees
- Very flexible and customisable
- Larger development community provides greater security and future development