We work content-out and user-first, but step one is always your business. We like to start at the very beginning, become a part of your team and learn what your website or application is going to do for your business.
We started out being a full service web agency, but soon realised that what we love most is bringing a product to life. We focus on working with start-ups and small & medium businesses and getting in as early in the process as possible.
Planning a prototype
We like to start at the “back of a napkin” phase, help think through the product and what forms it can take on the web. The earlier a prototype is built, the more time you have to feel the product out, fail and start again. So we’re out the door building as soon as possible. We’re dreamers—we have big ambition when exploring, and quickly to bring your idea to life first, and then, iterate!
Designing for experience
We define ‘user’ broadly—the end user is important, but so are the writers, photographers, contributors and people maintaining your application. The people who use your product the most are usually the ones running it, and designing for them is often key to keeping things great in the long term. So we write HTML that deconstructs well for engineers, we write CSS that’s modular and reusable, we design in style titles and assemble mockups so ideas are translated clearly and components are consistent across sections. Every user type deserves a great experience.
The technology
Our stack is built on pragmatism. It’s designed to go from zero-to-sixty fast so we can have something functioning and iterate from there. We build HTML+CSS on Zurb’s Foundation, and our admin on WordPress with Advanced Custom Fields. This gives us the freedom to build practically anything and we’ve built community portals, an app store, a customisation and pricing calculator with a CRM backend, a template engine and many blogs and portfolios.
Building in the open
We like to have clients involved at all stages of our process. We share a live link to our test server as we begin development, so the isn’t a big blank space in your product roadmap where you sit, fingers crossed, hoping all goes well. This is your product and the more you use it the better.
Collaboration
We are also happy to take a back seat with development and have worked with teams developing with Ruby on Rails, Django, Angular, among others. And we’ve also worked with visual designers to bridge the knowledge gap between them and engineers.
The Random Lines is not currently accepting new clients, but find us online for a chat and we’ll try and help