Around the water cooler.
The team at Gordon-Conwell came to us after a failed RFP process. They received a handful of proposals that were far outside their budget constraints and overkill for their needs.
They reached out and we talked with them about a collaboration approach where their internal team designed the creative and we consulted and built the site. The site launched on schedule and we created a functional extendable platform that we will support and maintain for many years to come.
Take a look at their newly launched network of (28) sites here - https://gordonconwell.edu
We often work with clients that need more of a partnership relationship with their digital agency and thrive working in this type of arrangement.
We often have client's reach out to us with a specific need or executional challenge.
Over the years we've become less reactive to solving their initial issue and more curious about their needs as a whole. Our goal is not to sell a prescriptive set of services, but to truly understand the past-and-future of the client's goals in-order to provide solutions that stand the test of time.
One of the main ways we achieve this is by offering a workshop-style discovery process that clearly articulates clients' goals, the perspective site users, their content, and their sitemap. Without this, we've found we are running in circles.
If your organization has grown tired of and endless stream of website updates we'd love to partner with your team to create a roadmap for you to execute against for many years to come.
For some of the sites we work on it makes sense to develop the site on the intended launch domain name. For these situations we provide instructions to clients about how to modify their "local hosts file" to view the site prior to it being live for the whole world.
If you are using a PC or Mac the process is pretty simple although it does require some command line access (gasp!). It can be intimidating to use an non-GUI interface, but if you closely follow the simple steps below, you will be all set in no time.
1. Start by opening the terminal program (which you can find using OSX search).
2. Type "sudo nano /private/etc/hosts".
3. Enter computer password.
4. Enter IP / domain name line.
5. Exit and save file (control+x, and then "y" to save).
6. Flush local DNS cache with "sudo dscacheutil -flushcache".
7. View development site by typing in URL (using a Chrome incognito window is best).
Please be careful with these steps as you can really mess with your DNS settings on your computer, but if you follow closely you will be able to view your development site easily.
Enjoy!
