We get asked

Yes – in fact we prefer to get involved with a project as early as possible. This means you can get the most out of us, and the sooner potential problems can be found the better it is for the project. We’re quite happy to be in the background supporting you, or to be visible to the client. It’s your client and you know what works best for the relationship that you have with them.

At Redefine we like to think we’re approachable web developers, with our feet firmly in the plain-talking camp. Our aim is to make sure you understand the process so that you can communicate that to your clients in a language they understand.

The answer to this depends on what you mean by ‘work’. We build our websites so that they can be viewed and used in the widest range of browsers possible. We focus on the most commonly used browsers when looking at the design and functionality for your sites. So we still support Internet Explorer 6, because many people continue to use it, but the site might not be pixel-perfect or have animated effects.

• Either layered Photoshop or Illustrator files – not JPEGs or PDFs.
• Make good use of folders for layers – segregate the different pages & parts of a page to make it more manageable.
• Use pixels (and whole pixels at that!)
• As you develop your visuals it’s not always possible to keep everything consistent (e.g. spacing) so we need a written specification or master visual to work from.

At Redefine we have a great balance of geek, with our understanding of web technologies, coupled with design skills and an awareness of questions a designer would ask. If we get involved in the early stages of a project we can help you get the best out of our knowledge. As your web partner we will also feedback useful resources and information that we find.

We can talk you through some of the differences you may like to consider when designing for the web. Examples of how we can help:

• differences in how type renders
• working with grids
• considerations of the user experience viewing artwork with a client as a JPEG in a browser rather than print-outs
• think about who will be managing the content

Your client’s needs matter as much to us as you. Redefine won’t take on a job that we can’t complete in time. We will make sure we communicate back to you our progress on the project so you meet the deadline.

We can help you work out the priorities – what you want to achieve at the launch and then set out expectations for client feedback, deadlines, etc.

Most probably yes, but we will need to assess the situation first. Some things to consider will be:-

• ownership of intellectual property of work created to date
• the deadline of the project
• the technologies used to build the website

If we can’t help then we can help find people who can.

WordPress provides the functionality our clients need without being over-complicated.

• it’s open source so we can develop it further
• there’s an active developer community so it is being enhanced & updated continuously
• if the company behind WordPress disappeared, then we’d still be able to continue supporting our clients

Open source means that anyone can review the code for loopholes – both for good & bad purposes. But as it’s open source it means that anyone can produce security improvements. An important point to remember is that you will need to keep WordPress up-to-date to make sure that you have the latest security/bug fixes. Problems can occur if the person responsible for hosting doesn’t have the necessary technical skills to set it up securely and maintain it.

Yes! It won’t necessarily make use of the new functionality of the browser, but we build our sites to work to existing industry standards – and the new browser will be designed to be backwards-compatible with those standards.

Websites that we built in 2005 can be viewed on iPhones and other mobile phones – something that we wouldn’t have dreamt of when they were first created.

We have a two pronged approach to dealing with a website problem:-

• Reactive – we receive email alerts if the site is down. We will then remedy the problem
• Proactive – we monitor our servers and view statistics to look for unusual or increased activity, etc

We set up the site statistics – usually Google Analytics – and look at redirecting traffic from old web addresses to the new site where required.

We sort out things like Google Sitemaps (to tell Google what it should include when indexing your site), Webmaster Tools (to find out later what keywords Google thinks are on your site, when Google has been to index your site, errors it has encountered, etc.) We keep an eye on how the site is running in the first few weeks and have bug-fixing cover for the first three months. We also look at the content the client is putting on the site to see how reality matches what was thought would happen, and make a note of what snagging might be required.