Our Process & Tools

Our Values
We strive to be: Focused, Disciplined, and Accessible for our clients.

Discovery
Our first step is to clearly listen and understand our client’s ideas. Based on our conversations, we’ll draw up early sketches for personas, and hand drawn wireframes to capture the user/customer journey and expectations.

Design
We’ll take the sketches after our conversations and transform them into wireframes using a storyboard format to see the bigger picture and overall customer/user experience.

Collaborative Tools & Process
We all have a love/hate relationship with email. One the one hand, it’s quick and easy to send emails but trying to find something or running a project off email will become a nightmare. Thus we use Basecamp, an industry standard Project Management web application to keep everyone including our clients in sync. If you’re more inclined to use Trello or Asana, we like those too!

During the feedback process, we break down all the changes to prioritize them into “bite sized” chunks called sprints (or blocks) of similar tasks. We do this to make the “laundry list” of things to do into manageable chunks so both our developers and client know exactly what is getting done and kept on schedule.

Our developers use GitHub private code repository to make sure the project files are kept backup and easy to revert to. Additionally, we’re big fans of Dropbox for sharing project artwork files and it’s ability to revert to any revision. Our main Dropbox account has unlimited revision tracking so most lost files are a click away.

And finally we encourage our clients to use screen snapshot and markup tools like Skitch, Glui, or Jing to communicate changes as a picture is worth a thousand words.

Hosting
We prefer tier 1 hosting providers like WP Engine, Media Temple (DV plans only), and Dreamhost. We’re big fans of WP Engine’s great performance (built-in automatic caching and CDN), security (Sucurri malware scanning), and support (they go the extra mile!).

WP Engine also provides an automated staging environment to help preview changes without affecting your live site.

The Future
Our process and tools are always being adapted for continuous refinement. We’ve learned a lot but we know we can keep improving.