Building Websites
is a battle
All too often building an Umbraco website feels like a battle, but it’s one where your specialists have to work together. Each team has its own motivations and frustrations and if they can't communicate fully the final product is affected.
We offer an alternative, more balanced, approach in which teams work in parallel and in harmony towards a common goal – a stellar piece of work which delights everyone.
Meet the web specialists
Hiring the best doesn’t always guarantee success. Everyone needs to work together to deliver on your goals.
Here’s how they think.
User Experience & Content
Wants:
customer journeys, information architecture
Frustrations:
Being unable to create the best experience possible, being constrained by the system
Design
Wants:
To make it pretty and pixel perfect
Frustrations:
Complexity, designs imposed by the system and messy states
Front-End Development
Wants:
Perfect design, responsiveness and interaction heaven
Frustrations:
Browser support, complexity and passed problems
Back-end
Wants:
Speed, logic and consistent authoring
Frustrations:
Messy data and being kept in the dark
The Big Fight
In a perfect world, Umbraco website production should be like a finely tuned machine with all sides fighting towards a common goal, against a common enemy.
Instead, specialists tend to fight against each other and the process falls into a negative pattern. They step on one another’s toes, people dodge responsibility and the blame game begins.
It can all get rather messy.
What causes all this angst?
When tribes go to war
Bad communication leads to confusion which creates conflict. If specialists can’t communicate and integrate effectively
the site will suffer.
Poor collaboration
When production happens in a series and teams are siloed, you can’t build a common understanding. Effective collaboration becomes difficult.
Specialist imbalance
If one tribe steals the show and gets it all their way the others will be affected. The site might work well in one area but struggles everywhere else. It becomes unbalanced and your users will get less value.
Outsourcing Hell
Long distance relationships are difficult at the best of times. If you can’t communicate effectively, specialists don’t know what’s expected and the end product will not be as good as it could be
Specialist Separation is necessary but without managed integration a site will not be in a controlled state
Partial Domestication
Too often, when the battle is over the finished website has become a Big Ball Of Mud. Mishandled separation and integration has damaged the routes back to the source state of each specialism. This always leads to...
periodic rebuilds.
Closing the domestication gap
At Balanced dev, we specialise in producing ideas and tools which reduce the impact of separation and integration on website production.
We believe that if we can improve the production experience by creating managed interfaces between specialists then working together and building sites will become easier.
Only then can we achieve... Websites as assets
At the same time as... improving efficiency
Improvements of up to 70% in the production process will lead to significant increases in productivity and efficiency
Book
Separation and Integration
An indispensable guide to balanced website production
Balanced website production is the future. In this book, we explore the frustrations of the conventional approach to website production and how our approach solves them. By focusing the minds of all the specialists, we can direct them towards a common enemy and common goal.
Coming Soon
Tools
Yuzu framework
Introducing a new separated development framework
We've moved away from a conventional approach to delivering a completely disconnected method of working which separates the back end front-end process whilst automating and simplifying the integration process. It's a fully functioning solution for creating complete Umbraco websites quickly, easily and reliably that are supportable in the long term.