Quixa first built a web page for a customer in 1995.
We quickly moved into web application development (rather than purely informational websites) and so have enviable experience in web-based, process–application development.
We are agile developers and have our own experience-developed approach to web application development, designed to maximise success and minimise surprises.
We approach every application with two questions:
- How does this work for the user?
- What is the process?
We are goal-driven developers. So we care about the users' goals when they are using the application. We may use user personas to help understand and explain these goals. We will use visual prototyping and user testing.
Because we believe that most applications and systems are really processes in disguise. A friend once described this as "The Quixa Hammer"; because we are "hammer people" we see every problem as a nail. We will always dig to see if there's an underlying process to be sure that the system gives a consistent end-to-end process experience.
We use the following languages / environments for our web application development:
- Ruby on Rails
- asp & asp.net
Ruby on Rails provides a Model-View-Control environment that is just simply a better way of building applications and mandates test driven development. We believe this is the way that web applications should be built.
Using Rails along with some modern sensible AJAX techniques allows us to build better user interactions.
Historically we have been asp developers so have the skills and the code library; we often need to work in a wholly Microsoft environment. Quixa is a Microsoft Certified partner.
Although the majority of our web development is now building great front-ends for our process development and the ProcessEngine, we continue to provide pure web application development.
Finally We should say one thing; we do charge more than most offshore development companies, because:
- We don't believe that a developer is just like a burger-flipper.
- We don't believe that one developer can develop in the same way as another.
- The best developers are three times more productive than the worst developers.
- We only use the best developers.
- We believe in semantic mark-up, CSS and web pages that look good and work in any browser a user may choose; (not just IE). This takes more time, but amply repays that time.
- We work in very small teams.
- We do not move people around in the middle of projects.
- All our people live near us - we believe that co-located teams produce better applications.
So, if you have a development project you'd like to discuss then please do get in touch.
