10 Things Digital Development Agencies Love

Working in digital development and marketing we come across a wealth of experiences, some notable and some not so much.

From the day to day we have pulled out some of our favourite things that we get to do.

1. Working With Co-Operative Clients

We very rarely see ourselves as an outside source for our clients, we are deeply involved in their business and become a part of it as if we were an employee or co-founder. We love when clients share our passion and see our relationship in the same way. 

Any client that has worked with us knows that our values are all about people and helping them. We care deeply and will often go above and beyond to make sure our clients win in business. By this token we are really an extension of our clients teams.

2. Cutting Edge Technology

We are through and through a technology-first digital agency. Founded by a highly experienced developer and staffed by technically minded professionals; technology, automation and AI has been at the heart of our business from day one.

If we have an exciting project to work on that requires using cutting edge or even theoretical technology we are ready to dive in and excited to do so for the challenge and experience.

3. UX/UI Design

We love to be able to create great user experiences. We believe that User Experience and User Interfaces have become the most important thing in digital development. Without a great experience it is not possible to create a great design that is beautiful, stunning and ultimately well received by customers.

Design is also generally quite a quick process relative to the total project, so it’s incredibly exciting and rewarding to see a project start to take shape and come to life. Not only is it very exciting for us but our clients share the experience and that adds to the gratification.

4. Analytics & Data-Driven Decisions

So much of what we do in the digital space has nearly unlimited potential with regards to generating insights for how our products and services work, seeing such vast quantities of data can be intimidating for some but we absolutely love it, with more data comes more opportunities to interrogate and gain a greater understanding.

Large amounts of data also allow us to utilise machine learning to a greater extent to allow us to make sense of data to a scale that no human ever could. The opportunity that data gives us to utilise AI techniques and implement highly effective features feels like a super power.

5. WordPress Websites

This one is such a guilty pleasure, WordPress websites are incredibly easy to develop for, especially with some of our AI assisted processes. WordPress websites are also very easy to handover to clients to maintain the content themselves and very easy to market after launch.

There are a large number of clients for whom a WordPress website is absolutely the right fit, while WordPress sites are generally very easy compared to the kind of work we can do, they’re nonetheless a guilty pleasure for how streamlined this process is.

Creating WordPress websites for clients is also how we show our junior developers how our automation tools will completely transform the way they work forever.

6. Performance Optimisation

Performance optimisation is definitely a specialised area of development, it takes a deep understanding of how programming works under the hood to be able to get extra performance out of applications.

Performance optimisation also covers a broad range of applications, from front-end website development which helps with SEO and user experience, to back-end processes and database performance. 

The scope is so large and extremely valuable; the sense of achievement that accompanies putting in a few days to a few weeks of work to streamline performance is elating.

7. Software Architecture

Software architecture is the second most important aspect of programming after how detailed the brief itself is. Unfortunately the architecture is something seldom seen by the client, much less that end-users. However a lack of good architecture is eventually felt by everyone through an ever bloated timeline to deliver new features and potential for introduction of bugs.

Good software architecture is something we are incredibly meticulous about because it sets in motion the complete future of an application. It also ties in very heavily with best practices which is something else we are very meticulous with.

Getting software architecture right isn’t just something that we feel proud about doing, but it’s the only reason we can sleep at night.

8. Redundancy

Most features will fail at some point, it’s pretty inevitable, the root causes can be all over the place until the feature is resolved there is some downtime. We work with the idea in mind that this is definitely going to happen which changes how we develop. 

Our features end up having multiple layers of redundancy, an example would be a form on a website. The way most developers would implement this is to have the form fire off what was filled in as an email, which sounds reasonable. However when emails stop working because someone forgot to pay the bill suddenly you lose your enquiries forever.

We don’t do that instead we:

• Send out the email via SMTP or failing that a backup mailer system
• Store the form submission on the DB, failing that it gets logged to a file
• Log all errors in the DB and again failing that straight to a file
• Run backup procedures on our servers to protect against the worst 

Redundancy, that’s what we like and another reason we can sleep at night.

9. Automation

We love automation, it’s at the heart of everything we do and has been from day one. Automation gives us an advantage that if something is repeatable and done by a human, then a machine can do it every time, with total accuracy and faster than a human.

We are obsessed with automation, the fact that we cut away so much tedious work means that we can focus more of our time working on the valuable parts of being developers for our customers. This gives us more capacity with less staff, rigid processes that are followed, the ability to complete work faster and the ability to produce work cheaper.

Everyone's a winner and we feel incredibly smart for doing so.

10. Continuously Learning

We are always looking for new things to pick up, we like to think we have an extremely competent offering and team, however we are always keen to learn new things and are proactive about it. 

We spend a lot of time reading books, finding best practices, refining our techniques and also trying to find new sources of information. There will never be a point where we know everything, however we are continuously learning to be better every day.