Web Design and Development by Cramer Dev

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.