Pivoting with the times: a web development story

The last 12 months have been quite eventful for us at Cubedroute and in the excitement we've neglected our much loved website.  It's ok, there's a good reason for it, I promise. When we first setup Cubedroute our vision was to create an agency that stayed small and never moved into the area of factory-style production.

We wanted to create beautiful detailed custom design and development solutions. However the web is a fast moving place, and as people expected to get more and more for their money, we realised that things were going to change. As the economy started to take a turn in 2009 our clients, many of whom are non-profits, simply didn't have the budgets to be investing in high-end design which left us wondering how we could stay true to our vision and keep Cubedroute moving forward.

At the same time, we stumbled across an excellent presentation by Hiten Shah, the CEO of KissMetrics.  His team was building a analytics solution for websites.  As they were building the product they realised that their initial idea wasn't really what people needed, so decided to pivot and move in a different direction, even if it meant loosing months of development work.  This concept really hit home with us.  We realised that sometimes there are emotional attachments to ideas and ways of doing things and if we wanted to keep our business going we needed to Pivot direction.

So, with that in mind and in this economic climate, the only way to do that was to become more that just a design agency. We spent the last year using all our skills and resources to create a set of exciting products that we can offer across the various sectors we have experience in.

We developed a cutting edge and highly specialised reservation and management system for student accommodation called Sabe, which we're in the progress of launching. Student accommodation is something we have a good deal of experience with, and is still a growing (albeit slightly slower), young market. We've put a lot of love and attention to detail into Sabe and are excited to be putting it out into the market.

Alongside that we've pivoted our web design business into a platform we've called Brick. Brick provides high-end, high-quality pre-designed websites that can standalone, or integrate with Sabe. Of course Brick doesn't just provide professionally designed websites off the shelf, that would be far too easy! It's a complete online business and comes with an arsenal of features like an integrated customer database, email marketing, build-in ready to go e-commerce shop, and of course it's all controlled by a super easy to use Content Management System.

At time of writing we're right in the middle of cutting up the CSS for the new 1.0 version of the Sabe website and will be officially launching the Brick site by the end of April.

Ok, I didn't want this to be a complete plug for us (!), but since you've read this far I should also mention that our sister company UPR is servicing the non-profit sector with two excellent products - which just happended to have been built by us too.  uMeet, a real-time online support product and uGive, a crowdfunding fundraising application. In fact we're delighted to say Aware (aware.ie) has recently launched its online support service using uMeet.

So yes, we've been very busy bees. Hope this explains somewhat the abense of blog updates. We're sorry, it won't happen again..maybe!

Related tags: Non Profits, Design, Culture, Communication, Django