Why 'Web Solutions'?

It may seem that we just picked a name that sounded a bit fancier than ‘web designers’ or ‘web developers’. Well, kind of. There are a lot of designers and developers out there, so it’s smart to choose a name that sets us apart a bit. But we chose the word ‘solutions’ for very good reasons.

When we sit down with a client we try to understand their problem or challenge. The challenge always is, of course, how to achieve the client’s goals for the website. This means we have to understand our client’s goals thoroughly and, if they haven’t really thought those goals through, help them to do that.

Sometimes the goal is quite simple – keep in touch with existing and potential clients; let them know about new developments; provide them with important information about the company. This can usually be achieved with a basic package, perhaps with an add-on module if the client is active online and wants to post news articles or run a blog. More complex goals usually include showcasing products and allowing for online ordering. Things can get really complicated though: we’ve had clients who want to deliver vast amounts of content catalogued in very specific ways and accessible only through user login and clients who want to allow users to sign up for specific courses and track their progress online. We have clients whose online ordering systems are matched by back-end functionality allowing them to process and track those orders, and to synch orders with their offline point-of-sale or booking systems.

So a client comes to us and says ‘I want a website that can do this’. They have no idea how the website will achieve that, and it’s not their problem to figure it out. That’s our job – to find the solution that will meet the client’s goals and their budget, and won’t break when users click on the big red button. There’s a code solution – or, more likely, many code solutions because we’ll have to build various modules and functions and databases all talking to each other nicely so that everything works smoothly – and a design solution that makes the site’s goals clear to users and easy to achieve. We don’t just make websites pretty, after all: we make them work. And that’s why we don’t think of ourselves so much as website providers as we consider ourselves solution finders.