Top shelf platforms, powerful processes, reliable pricing, and standards. This is how we do what we do.

Our approach focuses on objectively measurable quality, clear commitments and expectations (defined in writing), and a delivery culture that favors openness and transparency.

Industry Leading Platforms

All of our core projects are built on WordPress. And we build these projects with leading "Enterprise Class" members of the WordPress ecosystem to ensure that we have the highest quality and best-supported components in every project. We never touch unproven tech and always reevaluate every plugin and theme for quality and compatibility, support, and ongoing compliance with official and industry standards. Projects are built in Google or Amazon data centers (with certain specialized servers in DigitalOcean data centers). We also make extensive use of Cloudflare apps and services.

This palette of top-shelf tech allows us to build "traditional" WordPress projects with enhanced security, performance, usability, and expandability features. It also allows us to build Headless and Serverless WordPress projects with a very wide variety of features and capabilities.

Finally, we support additional platforms that function outside the WordPress ecosystem to supplement business operations that are sometimes required by busier websites and the organizations that own them. These platforms include:Discourse (online discussion forums), Matomo (web analytics), Mautic (marketing automation), NextCloud and Seafile (office asset and workflow systems), and SuiteCRM (offsite CRM).

Read more about our platform choices, or contact us directly when you're ready to explore in more detail.

Formal Processes

Projects are built and managed with dedicated processes that include clear and detailed status updates, brief educational materials wherever applicable, and highly standardized formats.

Examples include: WordPress Master Project Process, Change Request, Stack Updates, Out of Process Service Request (OOPSR), Feature R&D, Rebuild As Is, and even structured emergency response processes.

Formal processes (rather than ad-hoc rushes or Jedi Mind Tricks) enable us to deliver to you accurately and empower you to know where you are in the life cycle of your project at all times.

Learn more about our processes, or contact us directly when you're ready to explore in more detail.

Clear and Definitive Scopes

With a well-defined scope, we can (together) do much more than simply fight Scope Creep. Proper scoping preserves and enhances working relationships, allows project teams to properly evaluate project costs (on an ongoing basis, as well as at implementation), supports better training for project users, and enables all parties to realistically plan for growth.

And, of course, by defining what's included (vs whatever is excluded), roles and responsibilities, target dates (and how slips impact them), and other scoping factors, we are indeed able to fight scope creep.

Review our scoping policy for more information, or contact us directly when you're ready to explore in more detail.

Transparent Pricing

Our pricing model is designed to protect you and your project as well as us and our partners and dependents. Rather than assigning large padded dollar values to amorphous project phases or overly generalized delivery goals, we price by the individual feature sets that you need. And most feature sets come with fixed prices rather than price tags that are dictated by time estimates.

The costs of these feature sets (packaged as Features and Extensions) are predictable and reliable because we declare implementation and care prices (licensing, maintenance, updates, etc) in advance. Our pricing practices also include spending limits and pace controls that you can specify, price locks and price increase caps that protect you from frequent or excessive changes in required investment, and even competitive hourly rates for cases not coverable by fixed prices.

Read more about our pricing practices, or contact us directly when you're ready to explore in more detail.

Managed Production Experience

Website development and design projects tend to include a very extensive list of steps. You're asked to provide a great deal of information and resources, and we commit to transforming your materials into an effective online presence. This flurry of activity can easily lead to randomness and confusion, and that, in turn, can delay delivery, lower quality, and even damage relationships.

Recognizing these risks, we choose to wrap the entire process in a single "Managed Production Experience", rather than a list of separate and disparate expectations that can be distracting and cause loss. This centralized managed process covers all aspects of hosting (including the sometimes daunting security and configuration aspects), requirements gathering, materials collection (including default placeholders whenever possible), scheduling, Care Plan activities and reporting, dependencies (third-party components that add to your overall feature set), and more.

By managing your project in this way, we aim to manage away headaches, sleepless nights, confusion, and the fear of going live when ready.

User Empowerment

Modern websites, even simple ones, can be intimidating to users when they first learn how to use them. Add some sophistication with advanced features (e-commerce, memberships, content automation, forums, etc), and this challenge can grow very significantly.

Intimidated users, or users that simply aren't properly prepared for their new website duties, even when well-intentioned and dedicated, can freeze and reduce productivity. To avoid this risk, we empower your users to feel as comfortable as possible with your new website and its various management workflows. We do this by granting users access to your new servers as early as possible (well before the project goes live), providing training throughout the production process (rather than just upon delivery), documenting user workflows directly within your new Admin screens, and we even offer optional workshops to help users level up ancillary skills if needed.

Devotion to Standards

We use well-exercised, fully-vetted, and deeply-supported products and technologies in every project we build. And we do all of this while meeting or exceeding applicable standards.

Devotion to standards protects you and your project from some of the most frustrating and costly quagmires that are all too common in high-tech today, such as Vendor Lock. If your project is built upon "private" platforms, or even common platforms that are overly customized, or customized in a manner that departs from manufacturer or industry standards, you might be stuck with going back again and again (and again) to the same folks that put you in this situation in the first place, because no one else will take on the risk of supporting your mess (and certainly not at a cost-effective rate). By using mainstream technologies and proven standards, we insulate you from overdependence upon any provider (including us).

Proper adherence to standards also helps you stay current, comply with emerging regulatory demands cost-effectively, make required changes to your project without having to rebuild, train new staffers effectively, and much more.

Read more about our standards, or contact us directly when you're ready to explore in more detail.

Emergency Preparedness

Emergency response programs are critical and valuable (even if you never actually have to use them), but true preparedness covers much more than just hack cleanups, downtime responses, and the ability to restore your site from useful backups.

True preparedness is also about the lesser-considered emergencies that break projects and people: The ability to respond to attacks while they are happening, being ready to replace critical components if a showstopper vulnerability is found (and to do so without rebuilding the entire project at business-busting costs), and even the ability to hire content development teams to assist with unforeseen content production workloads.

Need even more peace of mind? Let's talk about disposification! For the ultimate in resilience and preparedness, this optional practice of dovetailing multiple backup, restore, provisioning, and deployment techniques together in a way that allows for deep replacements of critical assets rapidly and without the usual time-consuming escalation requirements, allows for true recovery from virtually any disaster, even if you have to restart in another region or country.