Communication is key

Web and app development is a complicated process that can present various challenges. To solve these challenges we’re working on something exciting. Our Agency platform is nearly ready to be released to our clients and is designed to mitigate the frustrations that you might have experienced during digital projects.

One of the most common challenges is unclear or misunderstood communication between all the various teams and components that form a digital project. This can lead to a project being delivered late, or not meeting expectations to name a few.

Agency, our unique AI driven platform, has been designed from the ground up to make sure all the project requirements are captured using our years of experience and by following a step by step process, resulting in a detailed and easy to follow scope.

Over the years we have found a vague scope can lead to various projects issues. This may seem obvious but as ideas flow, excitement takes over and everyone is keen to get started - misunderstanding requirements can lead to scope creep because the original requirements weren’t clearly captured. This can result in extended delivery times and costs what was originally agreed, leading to additional work and cost.

By following a few of our golden rules, Agency is going to seamlessly facilitate clear communication and documentation from the very beginning of your project and we can’t wait to show you.

White Label Web & APP Development

If your creative agency is looking for ways to improve web & app development efficiency and quality, while reducing costs we can help. What is our white label service? it means we work under your umbrella and directly with your team to build your creative digital projects.

Here are a few advantages to help you explore this route:

1. Cost savings. By using our white label digital development service, you will realise a cost saving. We have a range of different fee structures, which can be more flexible than fixed in-house salaries.

2. Increased efficiency and speed. Our experienced team will get work done faster. We have an large skill set to draw upon and often leads to less problems and delays.

3. Increased quality. We have strict processes in place to ensure all expectations are met. These have been honed through years of experience in getting things right (and wrong) and are proven to ensure your project is delivered to the best possible standard. 

4. Access to a larger skillset. When you use our services, you have access to our global team of developers spanning across the UK, Europe, Asia and the US. We can provide you and your team with a 24 hour service, especially useful for times of close collaboration.

5. Flexibility. A little like a human cloud service. Use us as much or as little as you need. We are also used to working with in-house development and technical teams. 

6.  Project management. All our projects are run by seasoned project managers, every detail has been thought through to formulate clear project plans.

7. Part of the team. Our pros can join technical meetings under your umbrella. We are used to integrating fully without clients and often become ‘one of the team’. 

8.Account management. Last but not least, when you engage with us, you will be assigned a dedicated account manager, who will handle the day-to-day communication.

What to expect when building an App

Building an app may seem like a daunting prospect, there are many factors to be considered such as platform, technology stack, database management, user authentication, etc. But itdoesn’t need to be, the following should be the only things you have to consider.

In-house talent or app building company?

When beginning the process of building an app there are two choices, hire in-house talent or outsource it to an app building company such as ourselves. There are a lot of behind-the- scenes processes that can muddy the path of app development including team management, budgeting and design choices. Our job is to handle this all for you and provide you with clear communication so that you can focus on your app. In order for us to fully understand your vision, there are a few things that we need to know in advance.

What will it do?

Before you start even considering how the app will work, you need to know what it needs to do. Are you trying to relieve an existing pain-point or are you creating an entirely new feature? The best way to do this is by interacting with your users, perform market research to confirm your assumptions and alter aspects of the app that may be unnecessary or difficult to use. This will save time before, during and after the app is finished as users will have already found the issues for you.

What will it look like?

Once you know what the app will do, we need to know how you want it to look. Prototypes help translate your idea into a format we can understand. Prototypes allow you to describe the way you want users to move around the app and which points should be the main focus of their attention. We can also use this to decide the best technologies to use and the optimal way to format data to make the app as efficient as possible. Ultimately, prototypes keep us on track and ensure the final product works exactly as you expected it to.

Does it need to be this complex?

Simplicity is fundamental for a good app. This includes both the features you would like the app to perform and the way users interact with an app. Some features require more work to be implemented than others, these include payments, subscriptions and compatibility with third-party products. Consider whether you can combine similar processes to reduce confusion for the user or minimise the number of pages in the app to keep it concise. Simpler apps reduce the amount of code that needs to be written and maintained.

How long will it take?

After completing all the previous steps, the development of the app can now begin. The time it takes to complete will be dependent on the complexity of the app and the number of features it includes. Now there is only one final thing to consider. How long will the app be used for? Apps will always need improving and updating as technology continues to change. Customers will also change, they may want new features or changes to existing ones. The longer an app is available for the more changes it will need. The hard truth is, app development never really ends.

Optimising Static Assets

Modern websites are created using a vast number of static assets, such as images, Javascript files, and stylesheets. These assets quickly add up to large page sizes and give your users a slow and undesirable experience. Even if your website backend is fast, static assets can really damage your user experience. Your assets can be optimized in a number of ways to help speed up your website.

Image Optimisation

The most obvious optimisation is to simply reduce the quality of your images, and therefore reduce file size. Done correctly, this can decrease the overall download size of your website by a large amount with only a very minor degradation in visual appearance. The file format also matters here, photographs and realistic images should always be stored as JPG for the smallest possible file size. Other types of images should be stored as PNG to keep crisp, sharp edges.

Minification

Minifying assets is a process which strips out all unnecessary characters from text assets to be used in the production environment. This includes unneeded whitespace and comments. While unusable in development, this can reduce the filesize by a large portion.

Minification can be applied to HTML, CSS and Javascript. It can be taken a step further by merging the same types of resources. For example, if you had a number of Javascript files, it would help performance by merging these into a single files. Even if some of the code isn’t used on all pages, this reduces the connections needed and the whole file can be cached in the browser on the first visit to the website.

CDNs

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are used to globally distribute your assets, so that users browsers can download your files from a server closest to them. This allows for the assets to be downloaded quickly and reduces load on your server.

CDNs have another benefit. Browsers generally limit the number of connections to a server to 6, using a CDN adds a different connection on your page allowing the browser to download more at once.

CDNs are best suited to sites with a globally distributed audience. If this isn’t the case, the other option is to simply add a subdomain to host your assets to get around the 6 connections limit.

Server Configuration

The easiest optimization of the lot is to enable GZIP on your web server. Once enabled, GZIP compresses your assets on the fly to be uncompressed in the client's browser. GZIP works best on text-based assets and can compress them as high as 70%-90% (https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-encoding-and-transfer). GZIP offers little benefit to image assets due to them already being compressed.

What are load balancers and why use them?

To put it simply, load balancers are a way of distributing work across multiple computers. In web, they are often used to distribute HTTP requests across multiple servers, so websites can handle large amounts of traffic.

Server-side load balancers are the most common method in web applications; it usually consists of a software application that listens on an external port (e.g port 80) and forwards requests from this port to one of its backend servers where the web application is actually hosted. This setup means the client only knows about the load balancer and prevents them from being able to contact the backend servers directly.

Load balancers increase redundancy in web applications by removing servers from the backend groups if it starts misbehaving. Load balancers are often set up in pairs to avoid becoming a single point of failure.

Session Persistence

The majority of web applications have data they persist between multiple requests from a user, for example, a server might need to know if a user is logged in. This causes a problem in load balancers applications as data is normally stored on the server itself, but this would mean other backend servers would not be able to access this data. The first way to solve this, is to make sure the user always connects to the same backend server. While this would work perfectly fine while the server is up, if that server become unavailable, it would mean the data would be lost when the user switched to another backend server.

Another option is to store the session data in the database, this allows any server to retrieve the session data, but increases load on the database server, so can affect performance. Sessions can also be stored in browser cookies, where the content of the session is encrypted. This allows the load balancer to simply forward the session along to the application and does not matter which backend server the user is connected to.

Benefits

Along with the obvious benefit of spreading load across multiple servers, load balancers often have a range of features to help with the deployment of web applications.

Auto scaling during high loads

Web applications generally have times of the day at which they are used a lot more than others. This is sometimes a predictable pattern (e.g. more usage during work hours), or can be the result of an unexpected spike in traffic. Both of these can be fixed by deploying a huge number of servers to cope with much larger amounts of traffic than needed, however, this is very wasteful as resources that are not needed at all times are being paid for. This can be combatted by only increasing the number of servers when the traffic is high. When a load balancer is being used, this is very simple. Servers are simply added to the backend server pool and your application will now be able to cope with the increase in traffic. The user doesn’t need to know about the new servers, and they can instantly come into use to deal with the high load.

HTTP caching

HTTP caching allows the load balancer to cache static and dynamic content, so that if it receives a request for an object that it has cached, it can simply return it and not have to contact a backend server. This reduces load on the backend servers and improve performance as there is no network transfer between the backend and the load balancer. This comes at a cost of the storage of the cache. The cache can often be stored in either memory or on disk. Memory is much faster than a disk-based cache, but is often more limited.

SSL Offload

SSL is computationally expensive for web servers to handle. You can reduce the cost of SSL on the web servers by performing the SSL operations on the load balancers. This allows the load balancer to send the request as a HTTP request to the backend server and also allows the load balancer access to the request allowing it to perform more advanced features.

DDoS protection

Being DDoS’ed can be difficult to handle, some load balancers include features that mitigate attacks allowing you to better handle the attack and reduce the effect on your users.

Firewall

Having your backend servers behind a load balancer means that their traffic can be heavily restricted, as the traffic they receive should only come from your servers. This means they are more secure as it is more difficult to detect and attack them.

Updates rollout

Deploying updates in a live application can be a daunting task. Updates could break your application and bring the whole service crashing down. Using a load balancer allows you to pull a server out of use while it is being updated without any affecting your users. Once the update is completed, you can then slowly increase its load until it’s certain the build is okay. This process can be done automatically and allows continuous deployment without too much risk to the service.