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Why We Develop In-House
We do more than design digital products. We craft them from start-to-finish.
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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.
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.
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.
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:
Because we do in-house development, we’re able to offer a lot of services including:
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.
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.
