When building sites, we always have the following in mind:
- We only build new sites using free industry-standard "content management systems", in particular Joomla! and Wordpress. These tools are utterly amazing, and we're so grateful to the people who develop and maintain them. In general we only use free plugins/extensions to build on site functionalities, to keep costs to an absolute minimum (ensuring that software licenses are respected). We try to keep this to well-proven software sources.
- One day, our client may wish to take the site to the next level, and pay serious money to a larger design studio. Consequently we try to design in a way that someone else could pick it up quite easily without having to wade through labyrinthine custom code. We also create the foundations so that the site would be easily portable i.e. easily transferred to an alternative hosting company.
- We design always with one eye on the future, and avoid anything that looks like a technical cul-de-sac - in this way the sites are future-proofed and always easily migrated/upgraded as new things become possible.
- If desired we can construct the site so that it can be accessed and maintained by the client (usually from the front-end so it's not too scary!)
- We're a bit obsessive about the "intuitive" nature of a site - a site that is not intuitive to use is the equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard.....excruciating - it doesn't matter how much flashy animation or technically stunning functionality you have on a page, if you have to spend any time hunting for what you want, it burns!....
In short, we follow the "keep it simple" philosophy.