Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

We only have our tongue a little bit in cheek when we say if you really want to improve your search engine results, you might want to consider relocating.

By way of example, let’s consider what happens when you search for “web development” near Amherst, MA. Google Maps shows results ordered by proximity to the center of town, and guess which web development company has an office closest to the center of Amherst?

When the Amherst College development offices move on-campus, there will be some closer-to-the-center addresses available, just in case you thought geography was irrelevant in today’s virtual world.

Another area CMI works in is taking complete designs from clients and rendering valid (X)HTML and CSS from the design documents. It feels like a pretty basic service, but it frees designers (who know what looks good) from the requirement of knowing HTML, and lets them create functional and interesting designs without worrying about how they’re going to realize them in markup. From the other direction, letting design proceed in parallel with code development means the developers won’t find themselves with working code and undesigned pages, a situation which (in our experience) usually leads to launching with a rushed and poorly-thought-out design.

We’ve mentioned our work on FlyFi before; the designers, Corey McPherson Nash, recently sent out a press release highlighting their role in the project.

Another project we worked on over the winter recently went live when Running USA launched their new site. Running USA, a trade organization promoting the sport and industry of running, started down the site overhaul road nearly a year ago. We consulted with them over the summer, assisting them in identifying the major issues to be addressed by a new site, drafting the eventual RFP, and advocating implementation of particular technologies. As the project moved forward, we worked with the project managers (a company apparently so busy they don’t have a completed website yet) to turn their wireframes and comps into valid templates.

In both cases, our deliverables don’t look like much in a desktop folder: a few .html files and even fewer .css files. But being able to count on the templates to deliver (and across browsers – thanks, Litmus) isn’t measured in file counts.