Tips to Provide the Best Website Experience

Using our website development process services is an important step for helping your business. Our SEO and web design services help business owners all over the country with lead generation and web marketing that improves their visibility, reach, and bottom line sales. If you've never worked with a quality professional web marketing company, you may be wondering what to expect. Here's an idea of what will happen when you contact us:

A Free Consultation and Analysis

We'll start out doing a full analysis and audit of your current web and social media presence. Our analysis uses sophisticated, data-driven analytics developed by our talented engineers to determine how well your current website is performing, and what areas need improvement.

Develop a Company Profile

Our web development professionals will work with you to clarify and define your target audience. We'll use this information to determine where to focus your online marketing. Depending on the target audience, we'll go through an organic process to determine what website design will fit with your company culture and sell to your customers. We'll work with you to create a beautiful and effective website.

Start an Inbound Marketing Plan

After we finish your website, we'll stay your partner in constantly improving it. Our inbound marketing services are effective and easy to use. In one simple platform, our designers will continuously analyze the data and see how your website is performing with your targeted audience. We'll adapt based on results from our research and algorithm and constantly be working with you to improve your business' lead generation.

If this sounds like a good fit for your business needs, we'd love for you to get in touch so we can help your business grow with our sophisticated website design services. We look forward to getting started!

What is scrum?

Although it only consists of five letters, Scrum is not an acronym, but a term borrowed from the sport of rugby which refers to a method for managing software development projects. Scrum is an Agile software development method which, unlike the traditional “waterfall” method, uses an iterative approach involving a cross-functional team in time-boxed cycles.

Understanding agile

Since Scrum is a type of Agile methodology, it’s important to understand Agile. The term was first introduced by Dr. Winston Royce in 1970. He realized that a large software system should not be treated the same as an automobile assembly line, where each part is only installed after a previous stage has been completed.

The main drawback of this approach, according to Royce, is the lack of communication between various specialists in the development team. Another problem with the traditional assembly line approach is it assumes that users and designers are able to predict the requirements of the next phase of the project with 100% accuracy. Also, the traditional approach relies on the hope that the initial design will still be relevant at the end of the project – often years later.

Understanding scrum

Scrum, the leading methodology for Agile development used around the world, was adopted for Agile software development by Jeff Sutherland in 1993. The term is borrowed from the sport of rugby as an analogy that depicts different types of players working together in a tight-knit fashion. In software development, Scrum is a flexible, holistic strategy performed by a cross-functional team throughout multiple overlapping phases.

The defining characteristics of Scrum are the time-boxed development cycles called “sprints” and the three core roles on a scrum team: the product owner, the scrum master and the developers.

What is a sprint?

A development cycle in Scrum, called a sprint, is a short work interval of usually two weeks. The typical process of a sprint is as follows:

1. Sprint planning event: Determines the work likely to be done during the sprint and prepares the sprint backlog, which details the backlog items to be done.
2. Daily scrum or “standup”: A short meeting of usually 15 minutes occurs every day at a specific time. Each team member gives a brief account of their work, goals and identifies impediments.
3. Sprint review: The development team assesses all the work that was completed, notes any planned work that was not completed and presents a demo to the stakeholders.
4. Sprint retrospective: A meeting of moderate duration, usually 90 minutes, where team members reflect on the past sprint and assess what went well and what could be improved in the next sprint.

Scrum is sometimes maligned for not delivering the accelerated results that should be expected, but this is usually due to teams not understanding the methodology or trying to borrow ideas from Scrum without embracing it fully. Scrum is the most prevalent framework for agile development worldwide and for fortune 500 projects for a good reason: because when it's done properly it generally out-performs other traditional development methods.

To discover more about this topic or to find out what our development team has to offer for your mobile app or web design project, contact us today.

Creating a website of any kind can be a stressful ordeal. The website development process has multiple facets to it in order to create a functioning, serviceable site. Many people, though, forget about customer service when creating their site.

In today's digital world, customer service is quickly moving towards customer self-service. Allowing for customers to use self-service on your website greatly reduces your support costs, as well as bolsters your online presence. Recent polls have indicated that nearly 75% of customers would rather use an online self-service than call into a customer help line. However, this also means that any online portal created must be easy to use, completely accurate and incredibly reliable.

Creating an effective and reliable online portal is easily done with some of these suggestions.

• Use peer-to-peer interactions and/or forums. Allowing the customers to speak among themselves lets the customer become more involved in your webpage and product. Human interaction is also important when one takes out the element of customer call-lines. Peer-to-peer interactions allows for that human interaction without the need to call into a line and speak in person to a stranger.
• Have an excellent search engine. This search engine will be the backbone of your online portal, connecting the customer with every answer they need. The engine needs to be capable of collecting data from every available source that coincides with the search it is performing.
• Organize your portal by topic. If you are selling more than one product, organize your portal to allow for easy access to information about each product. If your company's different locations have a factor on someone's search, separate by that. Anything that would make it easier for a customer to locate what it is they are looking for, have a specific area for.
• Communicate through the portal. Customers having issues with your website will look to your portal for information. Communicate any updates, errors or significant changes through this portal, and allow for a way for the customer to communicate back. An effective online portal gains its knowledge from its users, and a customer will only use the portal if they feel they can find what they need from it.

If you would like help with your online customer portal or any other part of your website development, feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to help you along.