Bringing a great website to market is not an easy task. Marrying content, design, accessibility and performance into a compelling package while staying on budget requires a seasoned team with deep experience. Below, we've laid out some highlights of how THOR brings design and development together to create digital experiences for all kinds of organizations.

‍Interwoven Disciplines

At THOR, our web process is highly collaborative, with our clients and our internal team members. We don't have firm cutoff points between phases in the project lifecycle but rather task categories that ebb and flow depending on the demands of the deliverable. For example, discovery work tends to be the most demanding during the initial sprints of a project but we will frequently circle back to the findings, or perform additional due diligence and research as a task requires it. 

Similarly, design and development are twinned into a single process where one element educates how the other is completed. We favor extensively sharing design directions with our clients and getting feedback that informs but doesn't dictate what happens in development. THOR leans on its interdisciplinary team to solve business problems, not handcuff each other into designs that can't be built or technical implementations that have poor usability. 

The result are websites that balance the needs of end users with compelling design, best-in-class technical solutions at price points that respect our client's budgets.

Deciphering Development

Even with a collaborative process, technical deliverables can be complex to understand. Our process is open and collaborative and the exchange between our teams is something we set up according to the preferences of our clientele. 

THOR strives to explain what we're building, suggesting the best tools and processes and layering a clean design aesthetic on top of all the technology under the hood. Some clients prefer to join in the process, shaping the work as it happens and making certain technical decisions. 

Other teams like to focus primarily on content tasks and evaluate web deliverables once they are fully functional, leaving the implementation detail up to our team. Still others look to THOR to help augment their teams capabilities, seeing us as teammates rather than contractors who can fill certain roles their teams are missing. 

We fill all these roles depending on the project and at THOR, our preference is to work with your team from inception to completion of a technical project, learning how your team operates and figuring out ways to enhance their capabilities. This helps us deliver the best results.

‍Iterating On Success

The ability to deliver a quality website requires iterative progress that builds on each success. It's much easier to see a complex web project as a series of sprints inside of a statement of work, rather than a monolithic deliverable that goes live at a given date. This gives our clients the ability to evaluate the work as it comes to life. This also greatly assists when change management is an unofficial yet essential part of the project.

Quality development teams like THOR are continually evaluating the web development world to see if there are better ways to improve what we're building, even while we're building it! We lean on our clients to set the direction for their business initiatives. Together, we can collectively iterate through a business objective by utilizing great tools, perfecting the solution in real time. 

This style of software development is often referred to as an agile process. At THOR, we utilize many of the tenets of agile— sprint planning, issue backlogs and maintenance deliverables are all baked into what we do. The core understanding to take away from agile work is not the micro managerial steps but the iterative approach to building large-scale digital projects. That is central to our process and why we've been able to deliver so many great products for our clients through the years.

‍Scheduling and Budgeting for This Work

THOR offers a vast scale of design and development services. Before building a website, it makes sense to know what kind of website you are really looking for. We have distilled a selection of them into our Website 101 series to help guide you through the many different options. If it's easier, just reach out to team THOR and we are happy to schedule a one-on-one consultation to see if it makes sense for us to work together.