Pivaleâs commitment to you
Like any great business, we hold ourselves to a high standard. That means every client benefits from our core services that combine to create websites and web based applications that help you thrive online.
In order to do this, our delivery model is built around six core pillars that apply to each and every project:
In this article, youâll learn exactly what engineering excellence means to us and how that benefits you.
For us, engineering excellence relates to the processes and systems applied for every client project. Itâs integral that our web solutions are:
These arenât optional extras when you engage Pivale to develop your digital estate - but non-negotiable factors to ensure your business enjoys the best possible outcomes.
Put simply, without these core features, we wonât publish your website.
By default, Pivale applies best practices and test-driven development principles to our projects. This means that before your website (or new feature) is ready to go live it will be built, emulated and evaluated in a safe âstagingâ environment. The benefit of this is that we can identify issues and fix them quickly without impacting on your customerâs experience of using your website.
During development and once the site is live, strict version control of code changes and content updates are put in place. As a result your websites are kept secure and are easy to roll back in the unlikely event that is necessary.
Furthermore, we use âcode smellâ detection tools to identify errors and problems before they occur. Itâs important to not only test the expected website behaviour (the so-called âhappy pathâ), but also to make sure edge-cases can be handled gracefully. For example, when a third party system that your website interacts with goes down, understanding and planning for how this should be handled is important to make sure youâre not frustrating your users.
Finally, our continuous integration and continuous delivery or CI/CD processes means code changes are tested and made for each new code update, without upending your site and increasing the risk of bigger problems as a result of small changes.
Thoughtful planning, good frameworks, and well written code combine to create great websites. Engineering excellence is found in multiple processes across our website builds, but a use case where itâs notably important is testing changes to live websites.
Websites always need changes at some point in the future - thatâs totally normal. But thatâs also why itâs important that we understand the implications and âdomino effectâ of making the right changes, without risking damaging your website functionality.
We create code that simulates changes to user behaviour to discover exactly what the results will be on your live website. With pre-testing, clients can be reassured that when changes are rolled out to their live site, theyâre going to work and not cause any negative impact.
Hereâs an example:
Your website is the customer-facing platform for your businessâ e-commerce function.
Behind the scenes, complex integrations link your customer records, ordering, stock control, logistics, and finance systems. For your customer to have a great user experience buying from you, all the systems must reliably talk to each other, updating if items are delayed or out of stock, triggering fast dispatch of items and taking payment quickly to keep your cash flow nice and healthy.
The chances are these systems will be from a range of software houses and reliant on integrations to make them work together. So when one software house makes a change or upgrade to your sales platform, it is likely to impact how your suite of systems communicate with each other.
Our job is to test before implementation so your customers and business are not adversely affected by an unexpected bug or glitch.
Pivale is a small team that delivers a big service. The business has been structured to ensure weâve got the time and capacity to do the right thing for every project, building optimised websites and web-based applications that achieve agreed goals, measure success and future-proof the investment of our clients.
Once live, our websites are typically supported for around 6 years, and thanks to our in-built engineering excellence, clients have complete confidence that their site is upgradable and editable over time, without any risk of downtime or errors occurring.
The team at Pivale are subject matter experts who thrive on complex briefs that require out-of-the-box thinking. For this reason, our clients benefit from the peace of mind that their digital strategy conundrums can be solved creatively, consistently and competently.
Put simply, AI is only just getting started and will be capable of a lot. But one thing is for certain - it has the potential to significantly alter and improve the way websites are created.
Donât believe us? Check this out. Chat GPT4 codes and creates a website from the notes on the back of a napkin - in seconds. As mind-blowing as this is, itâs only part of the picture. Until AI reaches the point where it can replace human decision-making on small and large business considerations, people will still need traditional expertise to make informed choices and a means of accountability.
Today, weâre making good use of AI tools in our day-to-day projects that help us innovate faster and remove repetitive aspects of coding meaning we can spend more time focussing on resilience, thorough testing, and systems architectures that serve our customers well over time.
As mentioned above, highly complex sites often have to integrate with multiple back office systems. Pivale builds systems that continuously monitor those integrations and, instead of problems going unnoticed until a customer has a bad experience, those systems let our developers know so we can deal with them.
For this to work effectively, monitoring takes account of more than just your website functionality which is made infinitely easier with the help of modern tools, including AI.
We arenât like typical website developers. And weâre proud to say we donât build websites like our competitors.
Typically websites are built for the here and now, with little thought for the future. Pivale builds web-based digital hubs that deliver immense value for organisations today, tomorrow and long into the future.
If youâre looking for a proven and trusted digital partner for your websites and applications, weâd love to hear from you.
Engineering excellence is the processes and systems applied for every client project that the Pivale team undertake.
