Transitioning Out - Responsive Process - Responsive Web Design, Part 1 (2015)

Responsive Web Design, Part 1 (2015)

Responsive Process

Transitioning Out

These days, it’s not enough just to build great sites. We also have to consider the longevity of what we build. While approaches like atomic design can help, we need to do more. At the moment, most of our projects include some kind of training component — and I’m not talking about teaching the client to use the CMS. As organizations begin to truly understand the value the web offers them, they are deciding to build their own teams to own and maintain their web properties. If we want to build something that lasts, we need to make sure the team taking on our work is capable of properly maintaining it. For this reason, we’re doing much more in-depth training around the techniques we use to build for the web.

Fortunately, there are now many common ways to approach the transition. Every repo we create in source control has a useful readme file; we deliver automated tests supporting our code; and we’re working on some ways to transition the performance budget of a project so that our clients continue to maintain the speed of their sites. Along with atomic thinking, we also deliver working examples of subsystems we build. For example, it is common for us to consider how typography works across all web properties in the context of a customer’s brand, so we might also provide detailed documentation on this typographic system, as well as a page of examples showing how to use it. These kinds of additions to our work make for a much easier time as we pass the code from our team to our client’s team.

There are also deeper repercussions to all of this. Understanding who will maintain the system you’re building should also influence the decisions you make around technology choice and development technique. In other words, if your client’s web team is not ready to use Grunt with Assemble and a local server from the command line, you need to find a way to work that better matches their capabilities. Remember, you’re building this for them.

It has also been tremendously beneficial to invite our client’s web design and development teams to participate with us on the project. Using the project as an opportunity to train your client’s team demonstrates incredible value and makes you an easy choice among your competition.