Our Approach

What if you thought about your web presences in layers?

That’s how we think about web projects. Well-functioning online initiatives have at least three layers, each of which requires its own kind of design and craftsmanship.

The Campaign Layer

Think about your goals and objectives. What's the desired business outcome?

Why should your web property (website, web app, email campaign, etc.) exist? To earn or raise money? To increase event attendance? To raise awareness of a problem or opportunity? Whatever the purpose, what one does online is always part of a larger effort. We get that, and we’re good at finding ways to make the parts of your campaigns work together online and offline.

At the campaign level, we think not only about your goals, but also about what participation in the campaign looks like from beginning to end. We continually ask: “Then what?” Someone visits your website, and then what? Think that question through carefully, and the whole project is more likely to yield spectacular results.

The Application Layer

Think about strategies and tactics. How would you like your ideal visitor to interact with your organization?

At the application level, we consider concretely the interactions we want to facilitate, the specific messages we want to project (verbally and non-verbally), and what “stuff” —widgets, images, forms, etc.—should be part of the finished product. Harmonizing aesthetic ideals with practical considerations about what people do, we make our creations play their part beautifully.

This is a level at which craftsmanship and creative genius really count, and we love it. We’ve done a huge number of projects, in many languages, with many platforms and frameworks, doing everything from simple tweaks to large and complex applications integrated into other systems. We derive tremendous satisfaction from designing and building things that we know will serve well.

The Hosting and Services Layer

Think about infrastructure. How should your web property interact with other systems?

The web properties we build almost always integrate with other software, and we help clients choose and implement complementary backend systems (e.g. CRMs, order management systems, email marketing platforms, etc.). We give careful attention to how our creations play well with other software as part of our whole-workflow optimization.

Websites hosted by North American Web run on a fast server stack managed according to industry best practices. The applications we host stay online and running smoothly. When another vendor can provide a service that’s faster and more-reliable than our own (Amazon’s Simple Email Service, for instance), we make sure our clients benefit from that.