3 important insights to succeed with modern web solutions

- builder of brands and businesses since 2000

May 31, 2024

12 minute read

If you're responsible for a website, online store, or web application, here are 3 crucial tips that could potentially save your company millions. We’re sharing insights from our experience with over 1000 web projects.

In this article, I’ll cover:

Choosing the right agency partner.
Selecting the right technical platforms.
Approach to project methodology.

The last one is crucial, and here you’ll learn how to spot pitfalls even when receiving offers from agencies.

My name is Øyvind, head of the web agency Represent. You can book a chat with us for tailored advice, or start with our general recommendations in this article (or simply play the video above).

You’re looking for an agency with a pragmatic approach to technology, ensuring all design and tech choices provide the best return for your business in the short and long term.

Choosing the Right Agency Partner

The first and most important choice is selecting the right web agency to advise you.

You want an agency that is both design and tech nerds, AND has good business acumen. Here’s the difference:

An agency focused only on design and technology might recommend the latest and greatest, potentially making you an expensive guinea pig. The newest and coolest might not be right for your target audience, and early adoption can be costly.

Avoid agencies that only focus on business and still use outdated platforms like WordPress because that’s what their developers know. If you only meet consultants in freshly pressed shirts and blazers, that’s a red flag ;)

The agency should be up-to-date with technology and design trends at a reasonable pace.

You’re looking for an agency with a pragmatic approach to technology, ensuring all design and tech choices provide the best return for your business in the short and long term.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is good personal chemistry. Ultimately, we’re people working together, and the best results come when values and chemistry align well!

We usually start with a free and non-binding meeting where we delve into your business and provide initial indications of the right direction.

If the chemistry is right, we proceed with a half-day workshop where we explore your business, needs, and opportunities as a foundation for making smart decisions going forward.

With a headless CMS like Sanity, we can build virtually anything. We’re free to build websites, online stores, and web applications with the technology that best matches the project.

Selecting the Right Technical Platforms

Our approach to advising on platform selection considers the company’s needs, opportunities, and budgets.

Broadly, there are three directions we consider:

01

Do-It-Youself (or hire a freelancer)

For small businesses with very simple needs and budgets under 50,000 kr, we often recommend a simple and template-based website builder like Squarespace. You can either learn the tool yourself or get help from a freelancer or an agency working on that platform.

02

"No-code" website builders

If more freedom and possibilities are needed, we can build solutions efficiently with a “no-code” approach, using tools that allow us to build web solutions without writing code. We typically recommend Webflow, where we can either start with a template or build from scratch very effectively in a visual interface. We’ve developed web solutions from small restaurants to billion-dollar company AutoStore on Webflow. If Webflow can meet the needs in the near future, we use it.

03

Code with a "headless" CMS

For more advanced functionality like e-commerce, marketplaces, integrations with ERP, PIM, or other things that can’t be solved no-code, we move to the most advanced approach, which is hand-coding.

Here it gets more complicated to explain without getting too technical :) Initially, we often advise on the right CMS for content management.

The most modern and flexible approach is using a “headless CMS.” Unlike a traditional CMS like WordPress, where content is “fixed” on the page you created it on, content is decoupled from the presentation layer (which can be websites, apps, newsletters, and other channels).

At Represent, we are experts in the market-leading headless CMS called Sanity, which happens to be a Norwegian company. Simply put, Sanity is a content database where we have complete freedom to build a good content structure and workflow for your company’s editors. You can read more about Sanity at represent.no/sanity.

With a headless CMS like Sanity, we can build virtually anything. We’re free to build websites, online stores, and web applications with the technology that best matches the project, pulling content from Sanity. This offers completely different possibilities compared to traditional CMSs like WordPress.

At Represent, we generally recommend the JavaScript library React, which has been the leading technology for modern web solutions for several years. Sanity Studio, where editors work with content, is also built with React. This allows us to customize the user interface with the same technology we use in the web application.

On top of React, we use the React framework Next.js, which allows us to develop faster and more cost-effectively. The final and most magical piece of the puzzle is called Vercel, which for a few hundred NOK per month lets you forget all about servers and the headaches that come with them. Vercel is built to host React applications and makes it very easy and smooth to scale painlessly on some of the world’s best infrastructure.

When we work together as one solid team, so many exciting things can happen that you hadn’t thought of yet, and with an agile project methodology, you allow room for that magic.

Agile Project Methodology

One of the most important aspects of succeeding with a web project is working agile, or “lean” as it is called in English.

Too often, potential clients come to us with a finished brief specifying the solution they want and asking for a price to build it. This traditional approach to ordering and requesting offers has a massive flaw: it assumes you had all the answers before you even started the project. We believe this is entirely the wrong approach to design and technology projects, as it doesn’t leverage our experience or everything we will learn along the way.

So, what is the right way?

To achieve the best result, you must work agile. This means setting some goals for the project together and agreeing on an initial plan for the solution. We can work within a budget frame but without fixed boundaries for what should be solved within that budget. We meet once or several times a week to discuss progress, possible solutions, and next steps.

With this approach, you have full control over how your budgets are used, and we have the room to be creative and constructive along the way so you benefit from our decades of experience and everything we learn about you and opportunities during the project.

When we work together as one solid team, so many exciting things can happen that you hadn’t thought of yet, and with an agile project methodology, you allow room for that magic.

The most extreme example I can give is when we started working with Vitamail. The original plan we quoted was to build an online store for the EU. After the first workshop, we were already on track to build an ingredient database and a landing page machine for their marketing department with built-in AI translations. It was a huge success, and we eventually got to the original plan of launching subscription sales in the EU.

The key takeaway here is that if you send a brief to a web agency and get a fixed-price quote back without being challenged further, it’s probably not a good partner for you.

That’s all we have for now. Feel free to book a meeting with me and our technical leader Alexander to dive into your business and needs so we can provide more tailored advice.

Have a great day!