A few weeks ago the Cramer Dev team got together in Chicago for our bi-annual company meet-up. I was hired on to our distributed team back in June and this was my first chance to actually see the people I work with face-to-face, so I was seriously excited about the time we would have together to catch up on both work and life. Yes, we spend countless hours together toiling away via Skype and working collaboratively on projects each and every day, but there is something special about being able to put a face to the each voice we so frequently hear. I was really surprised when I met Brian Cobb; I had never expected such a deep, robust, radio voice to come from an extremely sophisticated, yet short in stature, guy. I also never knew Brian, Jason, and John were so good at Magic, or that Colin regularly sports those crazy five-finger shoes. As small as these things are, they are invaluable traits we learn about each other that makes our already awesome culture so much more fun.

Our company has grown dramatically this past year in both size and scope, most recently bringing on a new product manager (myself), developer (Brian Cobb), administrative assistant (Teri Taylor), and front-end intern (Dexter Jacobs) in June. The Windy City offered the perfect centralized location for the Cramer Devveterans to meet the newbies like me. We spent a day at a great co-working place, the Coop, reviewing where we have been as a company over the last several months and where we'd like to go in the coming year.

I've loved the opportunities we've had over the past few months to help small businesses succeed on the web, as well as being able to work alongside start-ups to turn their vision into a reality, and even launching our own product - Gearman HQ - into private beta. With the sale of Josh's other company, Cramer IT, we are now laser focused on evolving over the next year to serve our clients and partners with even more capacity by adding a unique ideation and product management process to all of our projects. We can already build pretty much anything on the web, but now we can also help formulate a successful business model and entry into the market before we ever write a line of code.

In addition to serving our clients and partners, we are dedicating some time to developing our own products and research labs, where we can explore and build things that we think will make the world a better place. I, for one, am extremely excited about the upcoming public beta of Gearman HQ, a hosted job queue management system for developers to gain better insight into the inner workings of their applications. We have some other crazy ideas in the works too, but I'm not going to spill the beans on those just yet!

I'm not sure what the next year holds, but our weekend together in Chicago solidified the fact that we are all on the same page when it comes to being passionate about building great web applications and software products that solve real world problems. The meet-up in Chicago gave us the perfect forum for sharing that passion with one another and getting some quality bonding time in as a team. I'm already looking forward to the next meet-up…

Over the last several years, Cramer Dev has grown in numbers and success. We now have a team consisting of 16 full-time designers, engineers, and product managers who are 100% devoted to building web & mobile applications, websites, and helping startup-minded organizations start up. Because of this success, we’ve built a bit of a reputation in some circles as a development team that can build about anything in the web and mobile space. This evolution has been an energizing and rewarding experience for everyone on the team. I must confess that when I started this business 10+ years ago, I wasn’t dreaming this big. As we’ve grown, I’ve learned to dream bigger, and now in some ways, I feel like we’re just getting started.

During this growth phase, my time has been somewhat divided as I worked on building and growing another company on the side. Cramer IT Consulting provides small business computer networking and high speed internet service to businesses in eastern Iowa and has a staff of ten. Although I count being CEO of two companies as a rewarding and rare opportunity, there is value in being able to focus. Through trying to lead two growing small businesses, I realized that there were opportunities in both companies that we were not able to fully capture because of my divided interests as CEO. In light of this, I made the decision to sell Cramer IT and pursue a situation where I could focus 100% of my energy on Cramer Dev.

On July 1st, 2011, after a period of negotiations and planning, I sold Cramer IT to Circle Computer Resources (CCR). CCR is a company that I have known and respected for some time and was a natural choice when we decided to look for a potential buyer. In addition to handing the company over to capable and dedicated leadership, I wanted to make sure that both clients and staff were well cared for in the transition. These goals were met and exceeded and I am happy to be working with CCR in the transition over the next several months.

I sincerely thank everyone who believed in us, supported us, and gave us the opportunity to build great things on the web. Our growth and success has been a direct result of the amazing clients that we have had opportunity to serve and is a testimony on the fantastic team that I have the pleasure of being able to work with every day. As my responsibilities as CEO of Cramer IT are phased out, I am looking forward to dedicating 100% of my time and energy as CEO of Cramer Dev as we build bigger and better things in the web and mobile software arena.

Josh Cramer recently appeared as a guest on PrairieCast along with Jordan Lampe of Dwolla and Geoff Wood of Silicon Prairie News. The podcast covers startup news from the midwest as well as updates on what's happening at Cramer Dev and Dwolla.

Your company has probably been operating under a handicap for its whole existence. It's a handicap that has been so common that the vast majority don't even see it as such. The handicap is this: most companies are limited in their ability to find and hire the right people by a fixed geographic radius set up around their central office. We will call these type of companies "Geographically Challenged". Your geographically challenged company may have attempted to overcome this handicap by opening branch offices in multiple cities or paying for a new employee’s relocation or maybe even introducing flextime into the mix. Though these steps help the situation, you are only slightly mitigating the root problem.

At Cramer Dev, we've been building things on the web for the last decade. We are a virtual distributed team with members spread across 7 states and 4 time zones in the US. Being distributed as a team has been a pivotal factor that has enabled us to become what we are. It has enabled us to find and hire the right people, the best people, regardless of where they happen to live. We haven’t always been distributed. At one time, we only hired people in our small local community. Being driven by a desire to get results for our clients caused us to think outside the box and to remove the location restriction from our talent searches. The results were significant almost immediately and we have been able to deliver solutions and results to our clients that we never would have been able to before.

Although not every industry may be able to build a distributed team, those that are willing and able will outperform your geographically challenged team. Here is why this works for us and others:

Don't Box Yourself In

Geographically challenged companies are boxed in by a major limitation when it comes to hiring new talent. Limiting the talent pool to a radius around a physical location causes these companies to make compromises when hiring new people. The end result is that these geographically challenged companies end up hiring some of the wrong people just to fill the position. Not that they're mediocre human beings, it's just that they're not the best fit for the particular organization which they now happen to now be working for.

In a distributed virtual team, there are no holds barred when searching for the right talent. These new teams don't care where you live or whether you can make it into the office every day or not. They only thing they care about is: are you the right person for the job?

No matter where your company happens to be located, the pool of available talent will always be larger if it is not limited to a travel radius around your office. Because of this, distributed virtual teams will always have the talent advantage over companies that require employees to report to duty in the flesh every day. Jim Collins said in Good to Great that one of the most important factors in making your organization great is getting the right people on the bus before deciding where to go. Jason Fried says in Rework, “Geography just doesn’t matter anymore. Hire the best talent, regardless of where it is.” Being willing to hire anyone, no matter where they live, gives your company an advantage over those who box themselves in .

Reduced Distractions

The other thing about geographically challenged companies is that their office spaces, by nature, force every worker who enters them each day to give up some control over the inputs that will command parts of their days. In other words, when you enter your office building, you're essentially activating the big red interruption button at your desk and inviting anyone who may feel the urge to stop by and press it, thereby pausing or derailing your productivity. A recent study by Workplace Options even reveals that many workers are coming in early or staying late just to get some distraction free work time. Further, over one half of all workers feel that their productivity is impacted by distractions in the workplace.

No matter what kind of office environment you may have crafted, distributed teams will always have the advantage in creating an interruption free work environment. This is because each worker is in total control of their surroundings and can completely block out distractions and interruptions should they so choose. This is not a choice for people in most places of work. A distributed virtual team comprised of self-lead, motivated, and disciplined individuals will always have the opportunity to work in a less distracting environment.

Family Friendly

To get ahead in this competitive industry, it often takes more than working the standard 8 hour days. When you're working for a start-up that's trying to make a go of it, you're often encouraged to work long hours at the office. Slaving away on the next release, trying to meet that deadline, trying to hash through the final details. This lifestyle may be well suited to young single people, but people with families often find this pace unsustainable. Because of this, you've either created an environment that breeds burnout, or you've eliminated a portion of your potential talent pool. The President's Council of Economic Advisers released a study last year that showed remote workers are absent less, more healthy, and more productive.

A distributed team has the luxury of creating an environment that is truly family friendly. Remote team members can get moments away with their family, and then return to work after the kids (or wife/husband) have gone to bed. Work is as near home as it could possibly be and is as accessible as necessary for everyone on the team. It will always be easier for members of a distributed virtual team to make it into the office at critical times.

The Ideal Office

Another advantage distributed teams have over geographically challenged teams is the reduced overhead. Most people (especially in our industry) already have a home office, a computer, and an internet connection. In a growing number of industries, this is really all that is required for work. As shown by a report from The Telework Coalition, businesses can save an average of $20,000 per year for each employee who works remotely. A geographically challenged company is always trying to find new office space as they grow. They're trying to make their office space as cool as possible to attract top talent. They're stocking their offices with snacks, drinks, fancy furniture, and the like. If you step back and take a look at what's happening here, you realize that these companies are trying to make the office seem more like home. Well, let me tell you what you already know... there's no place like home.

A distributed team is able to offer the one comfort that everyone truly longs for. And that is the comfort of every member’s very own home. And if cabin fever sets in, a member of a distributed team can engage in co-working, a coffee shop, or mooch off a friend’s office space for a bit. Or if they like, get a closed door office in a co-working space to use whenever necessary. Members of a distributed virtual team will always have the opportunity to create a work environment that is more flexible and comfortable for each member of the team.

Enforced Process

One of the obvious advantages of having a team all under the same roof is a perceived ease of collaboration and communication. We as human beings find communicating face to face very natural, pleasant, and easy. This is definitely one area where traditional teams seem to excel. But what we often find is that processes needed to efficiently manage and ensure progress in a team are omitted in favor of ad-hoc communication. This leaves gaps in communication that make actual progress on projects sometimes suffer. We've all felt trapped in the middle of huge projects at times with no apparent way to regain control or to fix what's wrong.

In a distributed team, the lack of adequate processes becomes painfully obvious almost immediately in any project. If a distributed team has not created an efficient and organized framework within which adequate communication is forced to happen, the project will fail spectacularly and quickly. Ad-hoc communication may work for a while in a distributed team, but very soon, the physical separation of the members of the team will eventually lead to total annihilation of any efficiency that may have been hoped for.

A distributed team, by its nature, must establish efficient project management and communication processes in order to be successful. This more strict process allows distributed teams to:

• Quickly identify team members who are not adequately participating in these processes
• Quickly expose any weaknesses in your processes
• Force the team to communicate enough, but not too much

A distributed virtual team will always have a greater tendency to develop a formal process for work that addresses communication gaps. They have to in order to survive.

Getting Stuff Done

Another perceived benefit of having an geographically consolidated team is that managers are able to more closely monitor the performance of workers on the team. This is presumably because they can actually see, with their own eyes, if the team member is working efficiently or not. There are two problems with this approach:

• If the team member's contribution needs to be verified by manager eye balls in order to be validated, then you don't need that member on your team to begin with
• It's not any easier for managers to promote the efficiency of on-site workers than it is for off-site workers

A distributed team must set up performance metrics that can be objectively measured from afar. This means that the team is logging activities in online team chats, ticketing systems, code commits, time tracking systems, or other work management systems. It's easy to see an activity log for any given worker should you have any concerns. Gaps in the activity logs plus over-active social networking activity may be exposing a lack of effectiveness for a given employee. All of these things are way more visible for members of distributed teams. After all, not many of us keep water coolers in our homes.

Better Tools

None of us can deny the effect of the Internet on our lives. From Google to Facebook to Ebay to Email. The Internet has made finding things, staying in touch, buying things, and communicating significantly more efficient. In recent years, the same types of tools have been developed to have a transformational impact on our work lives. The end result of fully integrating these tools into our workflow is similar to the effect it has had in other areas of our lives. Our work experiences will become more efficient the more we begin to use these tools.

Geographically challenged companies will be the last to fully adopt these tools and will use the old forms of communication and collaboration as a crutch as they slowly limp along in this new age of work. Meanwhile, distributed teams, willing and able to adopt any new tool that helps them work more efficiently, will surpass the ailing, dying, traditional companies that are all stuck in the mud of traditionalism.

Meet-ups

In spite of all these arguments against face-to-face collaboration, having some deeper connection with people is still necessary. After all, most of the people that you interact with online are people that you have actually met in person at one time or another.

A distributed team can still obtain this level of connection by conducting meet-ups or summits periodically. Bi-annual or quarterly in-person meetings that include a strong element of recreation and relationship building are enough to fuel the culture essential to maintain a good working report among members of the team. These meet-ups also make for some epic times and memories that easily compete with the lame corporate Christmas party events that are the extent of any geographically challenged companies. In addition, these times can be used for strategic planning sessions that are often helpful to have in person because of the deeper emotional connections possible to create in person.

Get Distributed

Recent advances in technology and corporate philosophies have enabled companies to overcome their geographic handicaps. Companies willing to hire anywhere have been able to adapt their company culture and build more effective and agile teams. In distributed teams, the key factor is not that all team members must reside outside of the company’s geographic radius, the key differentiator is that this talent can reside outside the radius. This simple change in company philosophy rips the lid off of the traditional model for building a company and unleashes a new wave of potential.

Traditional office based companies may always have their place, but their period of dominance is fast approaching an end in this emerging creative class society. The company of the future is a distributed company. Distributed teams can be more competitive, more flexible, more comfortable, and more skilled. Those that embrace this change will do well.

Pictured: Cramer Development team member, in the wilderness, completing a task.

Or Why Telecommuting Makes Us Smarter, Faster, and Better Looking Than You

Telecommuting allows us to work from absolutely anywhere, whether it’s from home, a coffee shop or certainly far away from an office. It works for us.

Why does it work so well?

Our Fearless Leader tells us, "Fundamentally it’s because we have really great people." That brings me to my first point.

Great People

We hire the best of the best, unbound by geographical constraints. We seek the best engineers, designers and managers. We find people who are both extremely talented and love what they do. You must love what you do to do it well. The motivation must start with yourself and I find it comes from doing what you enjoy.

Start with the Interviews

Every job starts with an interview. Our interviewing process is unique compared to most companies. Since we work together as a team, we hire as a team. One of our designers, Daniel Marino, wrote a blog post about it. We want to make sure that not only are we happy in working with you, but that you are happy and satisfied with your work and work environment. We went so far as to create a Chief Happiness Officer to make sure this happens.

Agility

This is the foundation of our Cramer Dev house: We are unafraid to change and adapt to make it work. We've adopted the best practices, and are always seeking and trying new ones. We have time tracking methods, scrum meetings, lean project management and constant communication. With this in place, nothing can stop us -- not even nuclear disasters or magnets near our hard drives.

And as our Fearless Leader says, “Go for the results”.

Passionate About the Web

We might even be a little crazy about it sometimes. We want to know how the web works, inside-out and everything in between. What I love about our team is everyone takes the initiative to constantly learn the latest about the web. We also social network like mad: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. You name it, we're on it. (And if we're not, you should probably tell us.)

Challenges

That’s right, we see a hurdle and we jump it. Or at least we define the problem and write a pretty cool web application to tackle it. Either way, we're always up for the challenge. We believe a problem should not only be explored and solved, but solved the very best way we know how -- efficient and beautiful.

Time for Work, Time for Play

While we take web development and application development pretty seriously, we recognize there should be time to get to know each other, relax and joke around a little bit. To this end, we have an all-company chat. We use it to keep everyone up to date on the latest, including: alerts, potential issues, blog posts, funny videos, music, beer -- you name it, it's been in our chat.

We also make time to work together at our company meet-ups, on projects that we think are cool or interesting. Our last meet-up really fueled our latest idea: helping web developers process... It's so good, I can't even tell you yet!

Telecommuting may not be for every type of company, but it definitely helps us produce the best applications and web designs around. If this sounds like a party to you, drop us a line.

Cramer Development is getting together in San Francisco this week for one of our periodic meet-ups. As I’m normally on an iMac at the office, our employer graciously is letting me use a brand new MacBook Pro for the trip. Since it’s new, I have to get a working environment up quickly so I can get back to helping you build websites.

While I’m doing this, I might as well share the steps I’m taking to get this Mac ready for work. As a development, support, and operations guy this is my setup, so it’s not for everybody. It is a good template setting up any new Mac. Add you own apps and ideas to make it your own.

I’ve said before that I can get all my work done with just a web browser and an SSH client. That’s true, so I don’t really need to install anything, but here’s some extras to get started.

(tl;dr. Take me to the downloads plz)

System Preferences

To start off we can poke around the System Preferences app, the Dock, and the Finder preferences and view options. Everyone has their favorites. I like the dock on the right (just like on the old NeXTstation), the Finder in column view (the same), and some hot corners for Exposé and the Dashboard.

Run Software Update before you go; you don’t want to waste precious time and bandwidth downloading updates over questionable internet connections on the road.

Google Chrome

Safari’s nice, but Chrome is my favorite right now for 2 main reasons: It’s fast and it syncs. With Google Chrome Sync you can get all of you bookmarks, extensions and more by putting your Google account information into the Chrome preferences. With all my bookmarks, the web is at my fingertips just as I left it at the office.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a web service that lets you sync a directory of files across computes and the web. I store some important documents on my Dropbox account. Installing the app on your Mac gives you a dropbox folder that will automatically sync. Put some video files in there and you’ll make it through your flight in style.

Git

Git is a version control system that we at CramerDev use, along with GitHub, for almost all of our projects. There are a few ways to install Git on a Mac, the easiest being a standalone installer. If you’re going for the long haul you might want to go all out and install MacPorts or Homebrew so you can get all the Unix tools (including NetHack.)

I have a server where my private SSH keys are stored and once those are downloaded I can access all of our repositories.

MacVim

When it comes to editing text, I’m a big Vim fan, and MacVim is a Mac-specific version. Since I’ve got all my configuration on GitHub, I can have the perfect editor ready to go quickly.

If you’re interested in Vim tips, check out the Daily Vim Devotional, written by CramerDev staff and updated frequently.

Skype

CramerDev has team members in many different states and one day we may even have employees working in space, so we’ve got to communicate remotely. Most of our chats and meetings are done with Skype. There’s the current version and a newer beta version, take your pick.

Blink

Our office phones use Jive, a hosted VOIP platform. If you want to your computer for a phone, Blink is a good choice. It connects to your address book too.

Dashboard Widgets

We use Harvest for time tracking. They have a Dashboard widget that lets you keep track of your time on projects accurately.

I like to have a couple Weather widgets up so I can see the weather where I’m going and back home. It’s supposed to snow in Iowa and I won’t be there, but at least I can laugh about it while in a slightly warmer location.

If it’s football season, you’ll want the College Football Widget to keep your team’s schedule at the ready.

And More…

At the office I use a combination of VMWare, Outlook, Mail, iSync, Address Book, and Plaxo to to keep my Calendar, Email messages, Contacts, and RSS feeds all together. While on the road Google Apps can be the communications hub to manage all of this. If you don’t have Microsoft Office on the road, Google Docs can work as an acceptable substitute as well.

So the main theme of this lightweight setup is to get as much as your usual setup you can in a short time. Thanks to free tools that focus on synchronization and communication, it’s easy to have a comfortable trip with your information and sanity intact.

The Downloads

If you don’t want to read through this whole thing, here’s a list of what to download:

• Google Chrome
• Dropbox
• Git
• MacVim
• Smith’s Vim Configuration
• Skype
• Blink
• Harvest Widget
• College Football Widget

Think Vitamin recently posted an interesting article documenting the process they went through to hire a new designer at Carsonified. The approach worked very well for them and I think it's a really cool way to get some high-quality candidates to apply. As well as this worked for them, I’m not convinced that this approach would work for every company. Most development shops don't have an international "rockstar" status that they can leverage like Carsonified did. For most, I think there are two main reasons why a different approach would be better:

1. Many people will not swoon for your company like they did for Carsonified.
2. The pseudo project offered up by Carsonified may not be the best test to indicate the applicant's ability to deal with real-world client projects. More on this in a little bit.

Our Process

While we do believe that people swoon for us here at Cramer Dev, we've recently come up with our own process for hiring employees that is a bit more realistic for us. It's roughly a five-step process that is designed to quickly sort through all incoming applicants, and separate those that we think would be an ideal fit for our company from those that would not.

1. Applicants' resumes and samples (websites for designers, code for developers) are given a "once-over" to check the quality of their work.
2. If we like what we see, the next step is to do a 15 minute phone screen where we ask the applicant some position-related questions, and put their skills to the test on the spot.
3. If they meet our expectations, they get a phone interview with the head honcho, Josh.
4. If Josh likes the applicant, two things will happen in either order:
   • The applicant is given a group interview where it's no holds barred.
   • The applicant is given a project as a contractor to see how they click with the rest of our team and with the type of work we do for our clients.
5. If the project and group interview go well, and everyone is satisfied (including the applicant), an offer is officially presented.

Benefits to Trying Out New Talent

In the Think Vitamin article, Ryan talked about having the applicant redesign one of their web pages. While Ryan's justification for this step of the process makes sense for them, it leaves out some important components of how work happens in most development environments. Very rarely do we work in a vacuum. We regularly interact with clients and coworkers. And most importantly, we must work within boundaries driven by actual (and sometimes ugly) business objectives. Sometimes the true talent of a designer is expressed in their ability to make lemonade out of lemons in the context of imperfect or challenging constraints.

This plays out in the form of presenting ideas and deliverables to clients and obtaining "sign off". Testing candidates in this scenario will expose things you won't learn by using a pseudo project.

Letting the candidate try an actual project for pay has more benefits for several reasons:

1. You get to see how the applicant interacts/communicates with your other employees and possibly a client.
2. You get to see how the applicant would handle the type of work that your company typically takes on, including dealing with non-ideal constraints.
3. In most cases, the candidate will be paid for the work, regardless of whether an offer is extended. This also carries a side benefit in that the applicant is more likely to take the task seriously if he is treating it as an actual job.

Expecting More

At Cramer Dev we get to have a lot of fun, but we also expect a lot from our team members. We do more than just write code or draw pictures. The ability to communicate and to deal with every-day-issues are necessities. We need someone who is capable of working closely with our team and delivering solutions that actually get results for our clients. In order to make sure we preserve the quality of our work and work environment, we've chosen to develop the hiring process mentioned above. While it might not be the right process for every company, it has made hiring a lot smoother and faster for us.

We are currently in the process of launching a fairly large web application that we’ve been working on for one year. We built this application under a client / contractor relationship, but through the lifecycle of the project, we’ve been able to build the relationship together with the client to the point where everyone involved really feels like they are part of one organization. This relationship has taken time and effort to develop, but several things have greatly helped us along the way.

Transparency in Communication

Often in the client / contractor relationship, a wall exists between what the client sees and what the contractor is actually doing to get the work done. Sometimes this arrangement is preferred by the client, while other times, the client is forced to pry in an attempt to see what’s really going on with the project. It is my opinion that this wall needs to be broken down in our industry. If we are really doing our best work we should not have anything to hide, good or bad. Transparency is also the best motivator for us to always give our best and to ensure that everyone’s expectations remain based in reality.

Being a distributed team, we are very adept at using web based project management (we use Redmine) and communication tools. It was natural for us to invite the client into this environment and to interact on this playing field. I think our experience working as a distributed team actually helped us to teach our client how to work together effectively across borders. We granted full access to the project management site and allowed the client to see every action taking place on the project in an up to the minute fashion. This was not some site that we maintained for the client's consumption, this was the actual tool that we ourselves used to do our work. We also gave out Skype usernames and encouraged direct collaboration whenever it made sense.

Also through the process, we asked for permission and have taken the liberty to call our client out when we saw things heading in a direction that was not good for the project. And we’ve also asked for our client to let us know if something didn’t seem right or wasn’t happening in a way that worked for them. These kinds of discussions have sometimes been hard and have always required courage, but because we’ve been willing to deal with the hard issues, we’ve been able to build a team that is more engaged and more productive than we could have otherwise.

Ownership & Responsibility

Any successful organization is built on good people who take ownership of the different areas of the product or service. We’ve all been on the short end of this when we call in to our phone company or internet service provider and no one we talk to is willing to really take ownership of our problem. You end up getting transferred from this department to that department and then eventually disconnected. This condition can sometimes be created in the client / contractor relationship. All too often, the client is the one who benefits from the success of the product, while the developer only benefits from features delivered or hours logged. A gap can sometimes be created where issues fall through the cracks and the stakeholders have their hands tied, while the developers are the bottleneck in dealing with the harder to define issues.

To address and prevent this scenario, we’ve taken great pains to ensure that everyone involved understands and is on board with the vision and mission of the project as a whole. Without vision, the people perish. Together with the client, we’ve identified different areas of the project that require ownership and have made sure that all of our bases are covered. As part of this ongoing exercise, it is essential to create space and freedom for the developers and designers to do what they need to do to make sure that things are as they should be. This is not always easy for some clients and takes a high degree of trust. It is important to understand that vision and freedom create an environment in which people can do their best work. Most great designers and developers will be motivated and rewarded by being able to do their best work and in an environment where they can continually improve the areas over which they can take ownership.

Processes & Protocols

On top of all this, it is essential to build a framework that defines when feedback can be given, when change requests can be made, when and how priorities will be set, and how we will make sure that the most important things are always getting addressed. We follow a relatively agile development methodology and have adopted elements of SCRUM. The roles defined in the SCRUM framework provide a natural place to plug in stakeholders, designers & developers, and project managers. It has taken some time to really refine everyone’s roles in this process, but I’m not sure that we would do it much differently if we were all within the same organization. SCRUM is often used within the boundaries of an organization to keep a project moving along efficiently, but it is also well suited to solidify and define the client / contractor relationship if both sides are willing.

Building a great client relationship in a web project is as much about having exceptional designers and developers as it is about having a great client. In the end, your client is as much a part of your team as your developers and designers. But even after having all the right players involved, the areas I’ve noted above all need careful attention and plenty of time and energy to refine and build.

Introducing Stickies!, a visual team interaction tool for web projects in progress.

On September 11th we had one of our quarterly rumbles in Chicago. During these times, our distributed team comes together for a one day jam session. We try to pick something fun and out of the norm to build together as a team. The goal of this time is to take a break from the norm and engage in a low-stress, fun team project that we complete in one day and an outcome that will hopefully be useful to someone when we're finished. Normally we work together at the beautiful COOP in chicago, but due to a misfire on scheduling, we took over a corner of the Starbucks down the street.

During our last rumble, we revamped the cramerdev.com website. We've since received lots of great feedback on our site and it has been listed in numerous web design galleries.

This time, we built Stickies!, a web app designed to simplify client and team interaction on website projects in progress. Simply put, Stickies! is Sticky Notes for Your Website. This is an idea that we've had on the back burner for a while. We actually used a primitive version of Stickies! on a project some time ago. Today, we re-created the product and launched it as a free web service that anyone can use on any website. We built Stickies! using Persevere (a JSON database and JavaScript application server), Dojo Toolkit, HTML5, and 960.gs. By using all these tools, our 5 person team was able to essentially design and build the entire application and public website in a short work day.

Using Persevere's object storage engine, we were able to quickly create a working API without having to spend time working on data architecture. This translated beautifully to the client side when it came time to make the AJAX interactions that create and save the notes.

We wanted Stickies! to be very easy for website designers to use, so we released it as a web service. This means that we store all of the sticky note data for you on our servers and you don't have to worry about installing an application or database or anything like that. One of the technical challenges involved in building Stickies! was getting around the Same Origin Policy, which prevents JavaScript on one website from accessing methods and properties on different websites. This is a useful security measure, but didn't make our task any easier. With Stickies! we are not breaking this policy, but working around it with some handy features of the DoJo Toolkit. The important thing for you is that it works and it is safe.

You can try out Stickies! for yourself by visiting the new Stickies! website at http://websticki.es.

As a movement of churches with members stretching all across the nation, Great Commission Churches was in need of a website that would help to centralize and unify their movement. While they had a website in place at the start of the project, they desired to update both the design and the organization in order to produce a tool that would be useful to all members. Our goal was to provide a content architecture that would aid visitors in finding the information they may be looking for while also giving them an opportunity to express themselves through a sharp, unique design.

Initially, the organization of the content was the greatest need. With a large amount of content that is unique to numerous audiences, it was necessary to break down the information and prioritize the target audiences. As a result, the homepage itself targets 2 audiences, new visitors and current members. Using the section of the website that is above the fold, GCC gives a basic description of who they are and provides several opportunities for visitors to find a church near them.  The slideshow allows them to target both new users and existing members by including slides that point to resources for both audiences. In order to target existing members, recent news articles and upcoming events are made immediately available.

The design of the website was another important aspect of the project. GCC wanted to keep things simple, but allow the design to project a youthful, modern look. With these things in mind, we took their current logo as well as a few colors from their existing website and produced an design that would easily adapt to the large amount of changing content, yet still maintain a clean look. In addition to the general design, it was important to pay attention to the details of each page and make sure that as the content is updated and changed, the design attributes will be maintained.

GCC is thrilled with the completed project and their ability to easily manage and update their website using the Markup Factory platform, while maintaining a design that reflects the personality of the movement.

Our core five member dev team is spread across in three states (IL, NH, and IA). There are both benefits and drawbacks to this arrangement, but I actually think we are more productive being set up this way as opposed to everyone being in the same location. This is mostly due to the lack of interruptions and the opportunity for greater focus for each member of the team. Others have realized this same phenomenon. One of the drawbacks of being apart, as I see it, is what I call "the dehumanization of work" coming from the very isolation that adds to our productivity. This phenomenon is becoming more common today with more people telecommuting and working from home. I think we're figuring out a number of ways to remedy this including coworking, video conferencing, and collaborative online work spaces, etc.

Another thing that we do to re-humanize the work experience to a degree is get together once per quarter and work along side each other in the flesh. Lately, we've been trying to devise a one-day, bite sized project to tackle together during these times.

About a week and a half ago on May 29th, we all came together at the Coop in Chicago for one of these projects. Our goal was to redesign our development website, cramerdev.com, which was badly in need of some love. I'll confess that we did have a design concept and information architecture in place before the day of the project, but the building of the site all took place in one shortened day (with a little polishing on the following Monday).

For such a short project timeline, I think we're all very pleased with the results. In sum, the project consisted of a bit more than a simple redesign (we needed something for the developers to do):

• Total Site Redesign
• All New Content / Copy
• New Information Architecture
• Rewrite of the Blog Formatting Engine in Markup Factory

We built the site on our hosted content management system, Markup Factory, using the blog engine for our latest news section and Datasets, MFScript, and Dynamic Snippets for the Our Work section of the site. We used the Form Builder to create quick contact form for requesting quotes and information.

VetRx Direct approached Cramer Development with the desire to produce an online pet pharmacy. In addition to providing customers with the ability to order pharmaceutical products for their pets online, VetRx Direct had a goal to become the most respectable online pet pharmacy in the world and to create a supportive relationship with local veterinarians.

One particular challenge in this project was to create a platform that would efficiently collect additional customer information like pet name, vet name, and prescription information. The platform had to then manage the approvals of prescriptions before orders could be shipped. These requirements among others lead us to create a custom e-commerce platform that was built from the ground up with SEO in mind. We engineered a checkout process that set the bar for usability in the online pet medicine space.

In addition to launching the e-commerce website, we collaborated in launching an SEO campaign that propelled VetRxDirect.com to the top of Google search results for terms like "Pet Medicine" and "Dog Medication". All this has translated in to making VetRxDirect.com one of the fastest growing online pet pharmacies online today.

On May 11th, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy awarded VetRxDirect with the first ever Vet-VIPPS accreditation. This award represents a milestone in the online pet pharmacy space and puts VetRxDirect in the lead as the most respectable name in online pet pharmaceutical providers.

"Iowa?" you ask, "Where the heck is Iowa?" Many have joked, including our good friends over at Raygun. We are not Ohio, that is a few states east. And we are not "the potato state," that would be Idaho. We are Iowa, an agriculturally focused state nestled in the heart of the midwest. We are south of Minnesota and just west of Illinois.

As you are reading this, you may be thinking to yourself, "Well, what does Iowa have to offer? Anything!?" Aside from the Web Design Iowa City action, little do you know, this state has probably touched your life in more ways than one. For starters, you may be familiar with the famous Iowa Caucuses, a well-known first step in the presidential nomination process for both the Republican and Democratic parties. We've even grown a president of our own here in Iowa. Herbert Hoover, our country's 31st president was born and raised in this heartland state.

While we are on the topic of famous people, here is another name that may ring a bell, John Wayne. Surely you have seen or heard of the award winning actor. Too young for John Wayne movies? You may be more familiar with Elijah Wood whose acting career exploded when he played the role of Frodo Baggins in "The Lord of the Rings" Trilogy. Honestly, who hasn't seen those movies? Ashton Kutcher, Johnny Carson, and Buffalo Bill join the ranks of famous people born in Iowa.

Grant Wood, the well known painter of American Gothic is also an Iowan. (We do want to note, however, that we don't all stand around carrying pitch forks.) If you are more familiar with musicians, you may recognize Glen Miller or Slipknot. Those corn-fed boys sure know their music!

So now you know where Iowa is. You even have a few facts about the state. These will come in handy at your next dinner party or public event. Share them with your friends and family, and be sure to stop in and say hello on your next vacation!

Ramsey Creek Cabinets contacted our company with the desire to create an updated website to aid in marketing their exotic wood cabinets and countertops. While they already had a website, they wanted to update the site to include more images, implemented SEO best practices, and clearly defined their products and services.

After our initial meeting, we created a home page wireframe that would meet the desires and needs of the client. First, we wanted the page to include a slideshow of completed projects. This was to give the visitor a quick idea of they type of projects they could accomplish with their company. Second, they wanted to highlight their 3 most important products. A section was set aside for each product to give a brief description and link to more detailed information. Finally, they wanted to provide a quick and obvious way for visitors to contact them. The sidebar area was designated to providing this quick access.

In addition to the design, the implementation of SEO best practices was an important aspect of the website development. Our goal was to focus marketing efforts to target potential clients looking for exotic wood counter tops and cabinets. Keywords and phrases were inserted in meta tags, content, headings, and more.

Overall, the website has been a success for the client. The design truly reflects the personality of the business.

When it comes to church websites, it is vitally important to understand your audience. As a growing church in the Iowa City area, Mars Hill Church needed to produce a user friendly, informative website that would meet the needs of both new visitors and existing members. Our solution: a unique blend of content and functionality matched with a sharp new design.

The home page is organized in a way that provides recently updated content and information all in one place. New visitors can find service information, brief descriptions about the church and its beliefs, and ways to contact the church. Current members can stay up to date with the latest news feed and an events calendar. In addition, anyone can access recent publications or listen to the latest sermon podcasts right from the home page.

In addition to reaching a split audience, the website also needed to be designed for ease of navigation. The information architecture was created to allow all visitors to quickly navigate to the information they need to find.

After launch, the Mars Hill website was featured on several design websites including CSS Beauty and Best Web Gallery.