Digital Matters

Most agency newsletters are a little in love with themselves. This ain’t that.

Digital Matters is our semi-regular email featuring handpicked tech-first ideas and under-the-radar products that can help anyone who’s at a computer most of the day be more effective.

All Expertise Blob

Web & Mobile Development

Building solutions to optimize your business

How We Approach Web & Mobile Development

One size fits none

We feast on big challenges. We also know that consistent, incremental upgrades often prove just as transformational. Either way, we’re expert problem-solvers who don’t flinch at the size of your aspirations. Our pragmatic approach ensures you get the right solution to the right problem, every time.

Do it thoughtfully

Our approach to development is literally where we got our name. (Sorry that story’s not more interesting.) The point is this: Quality stands the test of time. We build thoughtfully and with your future in mind, focusing on long-term business goals, flexibility, durability, and scalability.

Complex problems take custom solutions

This ain’t no template, partner. Everything we do is planned, designed, built, and QA’d completely in-house, and always custom to your unique project. You won’t feel confined by pre-designed templates or bloated by over-engineered WordPress builder plugins. We don’t use them and we never will.

Site admins matter, too

While we are happy to help you manage your site content, beautiful backends are what get us out of bed. Umm… said better, you deserve full control of your site and to be trained on how to effectively use it. We craft beautiful, custom WordPress backends that help site admins get around, export form submissions, create pages with modular components, and easily manage their digital assets on an everyday basis. We’re happy to show you under the hood.

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Web & Mobile Development Capabilities

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WordPress

We take the work out of your WordPress site. Our team is purposefully stacked with experts who know how to take this easy-to-use, hyper-flexible CMS to the highest level.

We’ve been building on WordPress since 2003– the year it was released.

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Shopify

Interested in migrating to Shopify Plus? Already on Shopify and need a beautiful new store design? We know Shopify and power our partners with everything they need to maximize their store’s potential.

Manage the products, we’ll build out your store

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BigCommerce

Whether you are looking to re-platform, design a new store experience, or integrate your backend systems, we build best-in-class BigCommerce solutions that sell more products.

Fully customized. Fully integrated.

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Mobile & Native Apps

Putting your digital properties into the literal hands of your community is a job for professionals. We’ll guide you every step of the way. From strategy, user flows, design and build, to multi-platform testing and app store deployment.

If we don’t think you need to build an app, we’ll tell you that too.

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Memberships & Subscriptions

Membership organizations rely on us to build systems that attract, onboard, and retain members with seamless integrations that manage subscriptions, permissions, and payment management.

A flawless membership experience keeps your community engaged.

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Integrations

CRMs. APIs. ERPs. We know your site needs to hook into the rest of your business.

Third-party integrations are our jam (which is probably why we weren’t the cool kids in high school. But who’s laughing now?)

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Website Maintenance

We’re here for all the technical bibs and bobs of running your site. Plugin updates. Staging environments. 24/7 speed and performance monitoring. Nightly backups. Security fixes. Emergency technical support.

We got your back.

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Managed WordPress Hosting

Every site needs a home. We offer Managed WordPress hosting solutions that offer 10X the value of shared hosting solutions you’ll find elsewhere. No more worrying about servers, hackers, or downtime.

We don’t just host your site, we take care of it.

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Custom Web Apps

Custom web applications built to scale, and designed to solve your unique challenges. We’ll guide you through the process of hashing out and then realizing your next big opportunity.

Let’s build out your next bright idea.

Related Results

PHLCVB Logo superimposed on image of Philadelphia

DiscoverPHL

Maximizing Philadelphia’s $1.2B global tourism and business presence with a site redesign and a suite of digital tools.

Gelest Logo on image of fingers touching

Gelest

A multi-site network and suite of digital tools to support a global leader in materials science and manufacturing.

Heavyocity logo superimposed on image of guitar strings

Heavyocity

An extensible E-commerce platform redesign gives a prominent virtual instrument software company room to stretch its vision.

FAQs

Development, unpacked

We like to be flexible and responsive to your needs, we also like to deliver what we promise within the timeframes and budgets we have allowed. If you ask us to add new features to your website while we are building it, will most likely ask why? If we all agree that your new request will help us achieve our objectives then we will be more than happy to oblige.

If this new feature is something you would like to add to your website but is not directly tied to your original objectives, then we will suggest a change order or possibly we will schedule it for a second iteration of the website once it has been launched. Change Orders will be priced at a blended creative rate of $150/hr. The blended creative rate is a mixed rate including strategy, consulting, design, and web development. The scheduling of a new phase after the initial launch of the website will require a new proposal or we’ll just roll it into one of our digital support plans.

We build for all major devices and browsers. Obviously those trends change, so we keep up. Ultimately, we practice responsive design, ensuring that our products look, feel and function appropriately on any screen. If, on the off chance, you need to support an older device or an older browser, we can make that happen with some additional planning and scope.

WordPress is open source content management software that currently powers over 40% of all websites on the internet. The project is contributed to by tens of thousands of developers all over the world and has grown from a blogging platform to a fully-featured CMS. WordPress allows us to develop flexible and customizable websites to modern standards and observes web development best practices. Furthermore, the community of web developers that use WordPress reaches far and wide. This allows us to tap into this collective intelligence and bring that wealth of experience to your project.

Your product will have gone through our rigorous Testing and QA process before we ever share a demo link. We employ leading software services such as Browserstack to test on multiple browsers and devices in different environments. Once we provide a staging demo, we gather your feedback directly in the browser via a smart feedback tool that’s integrated with our Jira bug tracking systems. We provide a 30-day post-live warranty and bug-squashing period if by chance something slips through the cracks.

As mentioned above, we provide a 30-day post-live warranty and bug-squashing period if by chance something slips through the testing process.

Worth checking out

But Can’t I Just Use a WordPress Builder?

You could. But you shouldn’t. Here’s why. 

How We Approach Content Migration from an Old Site to a New One

We recently tackled a web refresh project that required the migration of over 4,000 pieces of content, specifically blog posts, rich in SEO value. Maintaining that SEO value was a top client priority. Here’s how we went about it.

Google Hates Slow Sites

Google wants to present searchers with a fast internet. As such, sites that take too much time to load get penalized and slip their way down the SERPs.

How Secure is Your Company’s Website?

Nobody needs to be convinced that web security matters. We all read the latest breach headlines. We all know a colleague whose company’s site was hacked. But what most businesses don’t know how to do is gauge the security of their own site. That’s usually a result of not knowing where to start.

Three Simple Reasons Why Accessibility Matters to Your Business

Whether you think so or not, accessibility matters to your business. Here’s why…

Partnering with us is easy.

With a diverse set of clients that span the Life Sciences, Real Estate, Financial, Higher Education, Manufacturing, and Global Retail sectors, we fit with organizations when they’re ready to stop and think.

Website / Digital Support Plans

Whether we’re expanding your digital presence or cleaning up a mess you inherited, sometimes an iterative approach is the best way to get the best results. Our blended digital support engagements are designed to make continuous improvements over time, with an expected billing structure.

Monthly engagements that fit your budget

Custom Design & Build

We think beyond the deliverables. We’ll guide you through a design-development-launch process that embraces your quest, excels at listening, and executes with style. Your complete satisfaction is guaranteed.

Custom pricing with no big agency overhead
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Real reviews from actual clients.

Read Real Reviews

Our reviews are independently procured by Clutch, a third-party agency review platform that conducts one-to-one interviews with clients on behalf of their agency partners.

It’s all publicly available on clutch.co and we think that’s pretty great.

Top Web Design Company Award
Top Web Developers Award
Top WordPress Developers Award
Top Digital Strategy Company Award

We’ve primarily measured success by looking at lead generation efforts. Since partnering with them, we’ve seen a 24% increase in leads, with no change in our budget. We’ve attributed our improvement in leads to the new landing pages, website content, and digital marketing efforts from Think it First.

Think It First has improved our bounce rates and conversion rates by 2% and 30%, respectively. They have provided timely responses, as well. They offer full training sessions for the team, so members know where and how to update anything.

Think it First has given us the quality of a large company with the size of a boutique firm, which is a good combination for us.

Think it First is, without a doubt, the best design and development company I’ve worked with in my 20-year career. They’re a small, nimble, but effective group of designers.

Let's join forces.

Whether we become partners for the long haul or just quick friends, you’ll be happy you took the time to speak with us.

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