Services

Validate your ideas before diving in.

Our Consultancy Service is forensic – we want to dissect your ideas and find out what makes them – you, and your organization – tick.

We guide our clients on the best way to express their vision, laying everything out on the table and examining what we find, together – with an open mindset, ready for critical commentary and suggestions.

Consultancy is really a validation process, the results might be helpful to the next steps of the project, or they might result in things changing direction, or even an idea being dropped entirely – however, without accepting all these options before digging in – the insights gained are limited.

If the first Consultancy steps go well, this is also the time to research demographics, audience and competition – And, always remember ~ “talent borrows, but genius steals” 😉

Let’s validate your ideas together, before jumping into the deep-end!

Dig deep, audit your data, prepare for action

Project Discovery is a holistic process that takes into account current assets, resources, aims and audience to produce a complete document detailing all the requirements and data integrations.

At this point, the core idea has passed by a thorough examination in the Consultancy step – the goals and intentions are clear, now we need to pull back the curtain and look in that dark, dusty place behind the stairs and see what skeletons we find.

If you are lucky enough to be starting on a brand-new project, we can skip the audits and focus instead on understanding how your available resources relate to the scale or the project being envisaged – bringing expectations inline with real-world capacity will help to build a strong foundation for the next steps.

During Discovery, we can also build on the initial research into audience and competition – to ensure that we are investing our energies into delivering an important service – it does not have to be unique, but it should be distinct to the current available offerings.

The end results of the Discovery process, which can last for several weeks on complex projects with large audits, should be a clear set of requirements, resources & goals in the form of a concise & human-readable document which will kick-start the shaping process.

Get everything in shape to smooth the project path.

Shaping is basically imagining all the square pegs we might try to fit into round holes and tackling those hurdles at an early stage.

Project Shaping is an analytical, visualization process which starts with a requirements documents and a set of goals and ends up with a viable road-map, defining all the envisioned pain-points, how to resolve them and guidance for each of the teams who will take the project forwards to its conclusion.

The biggest cost-savings in any project happen before a color palette is picked or the first line of code written, they happen during the consultancy, discovery and shaping steps and can have a huge bearing on the financial viability of your ideas.

Everything is possible, technically, but somethings are more complex ( expensive ) to achieve than others, we ensure that energy is invested correctly, in the key tools which will return the greatest value to the project.

Let us help you realize your imagination

The visual presentation of an application – UI – and the quality of the user experience – UX – have a direct and measurable effect on the success of any project – designing a solution that has both the correct flavor and visual language is key.

Design is a creative process, but it is also a pragmatic one, it is not art, it is artful.

Our design team specialize in translating the documentation produced during the discovery and shaping phases of the project into a clear visual language, which will inform and channel users towards the defined goals.

Designed briefs which require a complex UI, interactive features or unorthodox steps will be prototyped, reducing development time and cost and ensuring they function as expected in the completed application.

Visuals are presented for controlled feedback to defined review groups, ensuring that a broad consensus of voices are heard, so that the finished concepts are as representative as possible, without watering down any visual themes or compromising brand integrity.

Our design team will also produce detailed style guides, defining careful rules for how designs should be utilized, color palette varieties and branding rules – which will also include legal requirements about standards for accessibility.

Rock-solid WordPress tools, built to last.

Strong conceptual foundations, carefully shaped and well-considered, provide the perfect platform on which to develop your new WordPress application.

We build products to last, using modern tools, and apply bucket-loads of real-world and edge-case testing to ensure that we deliver bullet-proofed products, that will meet the expectations of our clients and the needs of their users.

Having worked commercially with WordPress for around 10 years, including releasing numerous open-source contributions via the WP Plugin Repo and GitHub, we have an in-depth knowledge of the World’s most popular CMS and provide a full-stack development service.

Of course, we don’t only leverage the power of WordPress to speed up the development process, our action-belts are full of the sharpest and most excellent tools – including:

• Invision App – for prototyping and concept reviews.
• Zeplin – to speedily convert concepts into pixel-perfect working templates.
• BootStrap – a key component, UI grids, responsive elements and huge time savings.
• SASS – modular css streamlines both development future updates and creates portable UI code.
• Barebones, Underscore & jQuery to provide portable ES6 JavaScript modules.
• Git – essential for reliable file versioning and branching.
• … and of course, we developed many of our key tools in-house – GitHub

Without water, the garden will not grow.

Finding out that a new brand-new product will also require ongoing support should not come as a surprise the day after the launch-party – it should be something that has been discussed from a very early point in the project and its cost should be as clearly defined as its value.

Bullet-proof development, thorough testing and a well-envisaged product will reduce the needs for technical support substantially – but ideas develop and any well designed product will also be designed to grow, not only to meet increased usage, but also to grow in a new direction based on new demands.

Technology is like gardening – and in a security aware world, applications require regular planned maintenance – validated on an independent staging version – backups should be scheduled and stored off-site, user data should be kept secure and regular scans for vulnerabilities run, not to mention up-time tracking, performance and SEO – truly, an organic product is never finished.

Investment without planned maintenance is a short-cut to failure, so any well-balanced project budget should also include long-term planned maintenance and a regular slice of ad-hoc support.