Devotion to Standards

Standards are key. They help us build quality and lower cost of ownership. They protect us from Vendor Lock and Frankenstacks. They empower us to extend and refine. We love standards!

Platform Standards

WordPress is an Open Source project built with technologies that are also used on many other platforms and projects. Each of these (HTML and CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, etc) can be used to great effect in many different ways and with many different implementation schemes. Like any other platform built on these technologies, WordPress "prefers" to do certain things in certain ways, even though, strictly speaking, we can ignore "The WordPress Way" and build as we wish. Possible, but rarely advisable.

Your project will be easier to implement and maintain (and therefore more affordable to use) if everyone you hire to build for you, respects the platform's standards. We are devoted to using the standards established by WordPress when working on a WordPress project. And when we build on other platforms, we shift to the appropriate standard there as well.

Industry Standards

WordPress development is an area of web development. And web development is an area of software development.

The web and software development sectors promote standards that are often optional and even more often open to interpretation, but they are always enlightening. Your project will benefit from adherence to common industry standards such as development patterns, naming and configuration conventions, quality measures and processes, software versioning, atomic deployments, and many more.

Ethical Standards

So much of the discussion about ethics on the web today seems to center almost exclusively on data privacy and honest trading. These are important concerns, to be sure, and the standards emerging from these concerns are valuable. But there are also other ethical concerns to which providers, and sometimes project stakeholders, should be held.

Honesty, simplicity, and transparency in scoping and pricing. Promoting accessibility. Implementing for vendor independence. Attribution and ownership of copyrighted and creative assets. Practitioner skill development. User education. All of these and more reveal a great deal about the ethics of providers, and these are all areas in which we invest continually.