Web Development

Our website is maintained internally by a member of staff, although, we often consult with Joe of EasyNoodle when we wish to accomplish something more technically challenging with our website design. Our current site was developed off-shore, but it became apparent that the off-shore developers were not as knowledgeable in the field of web development as they originally told us. This became obvious when the website they had developed was transferred to our test server: many pages were not found or didn't work. After much fruitless consultation with the developers, we asked EasyNoodle to help. Joe of EasyNoodle pointed out that the developers had obviously created the new website on Windows server machines, and our test server (and live web server) were Linux servers - the off-shore developers knew this, but failed to understand it would cause issues due to the fundamental difference between these two types of server. We then had to wait until the developers implemented the fixes EasyNoodle suggested.

Little did we know, our problems were only just beginning. Once these issues were fixed, the developers transferred the site to our new live server - we decided it was not necessary to ask EasyNoodle to do this, as what could possibly go wrong? Well, our site was off-line for several days (that is, our old site and our new site were both down). The off-shore developers told us that this was because of the way the Internet worked, and that we would have to wait until it sorted itself out. After 4 days with no website we contacted Joe of EasyNoodle and asked if there might be a problem. He looked into things and noticed that the off-shore developers had completely messed up the way our domain name was supposed to point to our web server. Without EasyNoodle's intervention, our site would have sat dormant indefinitely. The outage had nothing to do with "the way the Internet works", and everything to do with incompetence. Joe informed us that a transfer could have taken place with zero downtime had it been carried out correctly.

Eventually, with EasyNoodle’s help, we managed to get our new website up and running. Later on, however, when we wanted to make minor changes such as adding items or re-ordering items in the site's menu, it would take almost an entire day due to the unnecessary complexity of the new site's implementation. EasyNoodle were asked if this could be rectified and came up with a new way of defining the site menu that means we can now easily restructure our site in a matter of moments. We no longer ask the off-shore developers to carry out web work - it was a false economy using them, and we would not recommend them to anyone after our experience.

What causes issues like the ones we experienced? One problem that has been identified with off-shore developers is they are often run like sweat shops where the main concern is to churn out product as fast as possible using the lowest-paid developers that can be found. Concern for the quality of the finished work is minimal, and indeed, as we found out later, our delivered site had not even been tested on the type of server it was to run on - the so-called professional web developers didn't even own a Linux server to do the testing. What this means for the customer is their website is often developed by individuals that have very little understanding of what they are doing, mainly due to limited, if any, real experience; the customer is effectively paying for their on-the-job training. Your competitors may get better results, though, because you've already paid for their developers' initial hands-on training.

Web Design St Albans

EasyNoodle provide a personalised web design and development service at a very economical cost-effective price.

Web Design Harpenden

EasyNoodle web design are located only 30 minutes from the centre of London, in Harpenden Hertfordshire.

Special Needs Switch Box Mouse

Joe of EasyNoodle also produces a special needs Switch Box Mouse that allows a switch user to connect their switches directly to the mouse. This eliminates the need to configure complicated driver software on the computer when special needs software is to be used with one or two switches.