Why We Develop In-House

Back In The Day

When we first started building websites we contracted with outside vendors to handle development, or did simple sites ourselves. As designers, our development skills were limited, and for complex projects it made sense to work with full-fledged developers. The biggest challenges with using outside contractors were communication and collaboration. We weren’t directly in contact with the developers, but communicated through their managers. It was tough to effectively and efficiently get across the nuances of design and truly collaborate.

Our Current Integrated Process

Design and development have long been viewed as separate tasks. Designers design. Developers build what’s been designed. We don’t believe that design and development should be siloed from each other.

We include our developers in projects starting with the kickoff meeting. It gives them a solid foundation and helpful context for implementing designs. They also provide feedback on design work and advise the design team on the latest development best practices. Our designers and developers constantly check in with each other during a project, making for a better, more efficient workflow.

For these reasons, we only hire developers who value design and have a good design aesthetic to bring to the table. When they’re building sites and apps, they’re often making creative decisions and we have confidence in their abilities to not only execute, but improve designs.

Getting in Front of Problems

Our developers have input on the strategy for designing and building each project. This is crucial to building an end product that’s stable, reliable, and offers a top-notch user experience. In the early days of a project, a lot of interesting ideas get thrown around. We count on our developers to look at all of these ideas with a discerning eye. Some cool ideas may take a long time to build, are inherently unstable, or easily break. Our developers are able to offer options and come up with solutions to problems before they arise.

A Question of Quality

One of the primary reasons we shifted to an in-house dev team is to ensure consistent quality. Because we control the process from start to finish, we can be certain that our designs are implemented to their full potential, and that we are following best practices. This has a couple of benefits:

1. We know that when the project goes live, it’s well-built and stable. We have an in-depth QA process where everyone in our studio tests out a site or app prior to launch. Having in-house developers lets us discuss any problems we find in real time and get them fixed, pronto. When it comes time to launch, we have full confidence in the project’s appearance and functionality.
2. It makes handoffs easy. When we’re working with large organizations or tech companies, they often have an in-house team that maintains or makes changes and updates to their site. Clean code leads to a smooth transition. It makes for straight-forward training where we can show the maintenance team how everything works and explain our rationale behind the choices that were made.

We Got You

Because we do in-house development, we’re able to offer a lot of services including:

• Full-Stack Development
• CMS Platforms
• E-Commerce
• Web Applications
• API Development
• Custom Plugins
• Accessibility
• Third-party Integrations
• JavaScript Applications

See all of our services

That’s good news for our clients because we can bring our dedication to well-built digital products, large and small, without having to pull in outside contractors that might not share our passion for quality.

Providing Value

We’re always looking to provide as much value as possible. In-house development is one of those ways. Our collaborative process that includes our developers throughout a project provides additional value, saving time and making the ongoing care and maintenance of a site or app more straight-forward and efficient.

Having developers on our team have made us better designers and helped us optimize the work we do for our clients.

Want to learn more about our design and development philosophies? Let’s chat.