News / Archive / Web Development for the Design Agency

Sumac has a great track record in providing high quality web development services geared towards helping the design agency strengthen their delivery capacity in the online market. We have worked with a number of design-focused companies to turn their creativity into a website that works for their clients. We are now looking forward to widening our base of satisfied design agency clients.

As a technical implementation partner, we understand the challenges our clients face. Some specific areas of concern include:

• Availability - Many smaller agencies do not have the capacity to have full-time developers on staff and have to rely on freelancers. This often causes problems in sourcing developers when required.
• Balancing - Given the nature of project work, software development does not always fall into planned "chunks" of work. Often resources have to be "balanced" between project requirements. We recognise that design agencies do not always have the flexibility to address these issues, and have to either pay the staff during downtime, or lay off freelancers with the risk that they will lose them from the project.
• Continuity - Because of availability problems, projects often use various developers throughout a project. This can lead to quality issues and time wasted on new staff getting up to speed when joining projects.
• Standards - Freelancers or un-managed developers can vary on the coding and documentation standards they use.
• Support & Maintenance - Even if all the usual issues can be resolved during the project duration, there can still be related problems post-go-live, particularly around support, maintenance and product enhancements.
• Unpredictable costs - Freelancers and staff are generally on daily rates and the scope of work is often not understood from the outset. Sumac always aim to provide early specifications and fixed price deliverables.
• Content Management - We have found that the agency's clients are now often asking for an easy-to-use CMS as part of the deliverable.
• Design Integrity - A common problem is that developers will compromise the agency's design during the implementation. This can also happen where the CMS does not protect the design components.
• Accessibility - Many developers do not understand the importance of accessibility standards. This is an issue not only for disabled users, but also in building search-engine "friendly" sites.
• Proximity - developers working off-shore or at sites some distance from the agency means that clients cannot enjoy the advantages of face-to-face collaboration.

If any of these problems seem all too familiar, then give David Evans a call on 0207 033 3774 or contact him via our email form.

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