Boring by Design: Hammer Website Development

Digital marketing agencies like ours exist to help businesses stand out and get noticed. As such, there’s no greater fear in agency land than being perceived as the b-word:

Boring.

But here’s the rub: Creative aside, there are some aspects of client work that should be uneventful, methodical, predictable – yes, even enough to make you want to curl up for a cat nap or full-fledged snooze.

Chief among them?

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the most boring aspect of Hammer Marketing…a key reason UpCity calls us a Best PA Marketing Agency…

Website development!

The Two Sides of Websites

Before we discuss why website development is and should be boring, a reminder of the value of websites themselves.

Even as businesses’ digital footprints stretch across a growing number of platforms, websites still reign supreme. Your website is your company’s digital calling card – and, in many cases, a revenue stream. Ideally, your business website is interactive, strategically organized, and engaging. At minimum, it needs to abide by best practices, look up-to-date, and work. Functionality flaws don’t just send users packing; they can negatively impact SEO.

Getting your website to look great and work great is the responsibility of two different functions, or phases: Website design and website development. Knowing the difference between the two is key:

The design aspect of your website’s creation is the “fun” part.  Your agency presents its vision for your new website to you in wireframe form. Although web design standards certainly exist, design is subjective, and open to creative flair. A great agency will incorporate motion, innovative features, and strong use of your brand’s design elements without losing site of user journey and all of the practical functions the site needs to offer.

Once that design is approved, a website goes into development.

This is where things get spectacularly boring!

Development is the back-end portion of the web build process, implemented over hundreds of hours of work necessary to bringing that exciting design to life. To use a car as a metaphor: If design implies surface curvature and color, development is the motor and aerodynamics that allow it to run. Website development includes backups, internal checks, linting that checks code errors, and use of AI tools that read error logs and optimize code, to name just a few.

Now, do Hammer Marketing developers themselves find development work boring? Nope! We know full well the integral role of our work and say, “Game on!” But here’s what we mean by boring: Development happens behind the scenes, is largely objective, and, if everyone’s doing their best, is uneventful. Drama-free. The more routine the development process is, the more likely your site launch will go smoothly, with everything working correctly and matching the design comps you approved. And all of this should more or less happen without you realizing it! If you and your agency need to discuss your website’s development in depth, it’s probably because there are problems on their end that could have been avoided by a tighter, more boring process.

Why Hammer Draws a Line Between Design and Development

Hammer Marketing’s development process can afford to be so methodical…so “boring”… because we treat design and development the way they should be treated: as separate entities.

Many agencies (understaffed agencies especially) are more adept at design than development. They hire website designers with limited development experience. As such, quality control responsibilities end up getting shortchanged and website issues aren’t discovered until after launch. We’ve heard the stories: A client doesn’t realize that its site is wonky or looks weird until after it’s already gone live and their client calls it out!

Hammer shirks this approach. We strive to discover and smooth out every design and functionality wrinkle before a website launches. We’re adept at this in large part because our in-house website development team is advanced. Most of us have software development experience, meaning our website development process abides by standards that are tighter than those that govern website design.  

Boring in Practice

So what do those hundreds of hours of boring development include? Here are a few pieces of the development pie:

• Linting is the automated checking of source code for programmatic and stylistic errors, completed by a tool known as linter – a static code analyzer. As developers type code, the linter offers real-time formatting recommendations while also highlighting potential errors.
• IntelliSense lets us edit code more readily and efficiently via features including code completion, parameter information, and member lists.
• Git is instrumental to version control, letting our team keep track of work as it evolves and refer back to earlier versions when needed.
• Numerous Internal processes and reviews. Designers and developers cross-check work and compare outcomes to the design comps and blueprint.   
• In terms of AI support, our team loves Microsoft Copilot for its ability to interpret error logs.

Does your business want to tap the web design experts that do hundreds of hours of “boring” systematized development work every day in the quest to deliver glitch-free websites and apps? Contact Hammer Marketing for a free consultation.