"Providing best practice in website development and marketing to small to medium sized businesses"

It's a straight forward goal. Bring the quality, attention to detail and progressive approach found in many of the corporate sector websites within reach of smaller more agile businesses. We're not saying it hasn't been hard work, but we feel it's a claim we can start to make.

Founded in 2006 Appropriate Solutions was created by Stuart Laverick out of a desire to work to the rapidly emerging sets of web development standards being put forward by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as well as what are considered best practices in software development. At the time many 'Web Designers' were self taught with little awareness that there were sets of standards to follow, this resulted in a mosaic of quality throughout the industry with many lower cost websites being of poor quality.

Openness, Transparency and Empowerment

Borrowing from experience gained in working on a range of web projects, Appropriate Solutions aims are:

• To be as transparent in our processes as possible
• To include clients in all stages of the project
• Where possible to use best practices within the build cycle of any project
• To create maintainable and upgradeable websites that reduced costs in the longer term
• To empower the client to take control of there own web presence
• To use open technologies that leave clients free to switch service provider if necessary

We don't use proprietary software in an attempt to lock clients in, then charge maintenance fees for every update. Instead, we like to use Open Source software if possible, such as Joomla! Wordpress and Magento for our Content Management Systems, Linux and Apache for our Servers and HTML, PHP, Python, Javascript and CSS for our code. This allows us to be more flexible in what we produce, if we need to change a part of the code to meet a project requirement we don't have to submit a request to the development team and wait, instead we can simply alter the code base ourselves. The web is built on Open Source technologies as they are flexible enough to suit a variety of projects, have rapid maintenance and improvement cycles and can be easily extended to meet individual needs.

No hard sell, in fact no salesmen at all

The business model we most want to avoid, and one which we have seen regularly in larger agencies, is one where clients are required to support a small number of developers and a large team of sales professionals. This over sell and under deliver approach tends to result in a high turnover of clients, with each client having to pay for the sales teams bonuses through increased fees. We don't have a sales team, if you call us you will speak to one of our developers, who will be knowledgeable about their area and will offer an honest opinion on your enquiry.

This approach has led to slower growth than our competitors but we have retained almost all our original clients and we continue to attract new clients who appreciate our professional honest methods of working. If you feel you would like to join us and find out how we can help you realise your web ambitions, just contact Appropriate Solutions for an informal chat.