Web Development, Graphic Design and Hosting
We love making websites that help businesses grow. We use the robust Python Django Framework, and an excellent Content Management System called Wagtail, which work together to make it easy to keep your site SEO friendly. You'll never have to wait to update your copy, you can simply log in and make the changes yourself using Wagtail's amazing built-in rich-text editor.
You can even move sections of your pages around using the visual editor, or give articles you write a unique custom look, embedding videos, images, documents, or other content.
Fast Pages
At Blistering Developers, we write software to make time matter.
That means we focus on making pages faster; fast execution, and fast delivery.
We host on our own custom hardware. We love speed, and we spend far more time than is healthy benchmarking, monitoring and optimizing our servers, in order to eek every last drop of performance. We offer these servers to you to get your content delivered fast. The quicker a site loads, the better the user experience, and the more likely they are to come back.
Fast Page Guarantee
The importance of a website being timely
Google benchmarks your website's user experience to influence your SEO rankings. Optimizing websites for speed, however, can be a technical and time-consuming process. It's often ignored by web developers who are more interested in doing things cheaply and hoping the customer doesn't notice.
Judging by how many sites load slowly, it seems not many do. But we notice. We don't like it. This is why we offer a speed guarantee for the sites we build and host for you.
Why should you care?
A website that's actively speedy is less drag for a user. Web surfers, the delightful creatures that they are, have a million other things calling their attention. Even waiting 3-4 seconds is long enough for them to wonder why they were even there in the first place. A fast site is unconsciously less unpleasant to use. The best analogy for this, is to imagine if your two favourite restaurants happened to be next to each other. The one on the left greets you with a smile and seats you within 30 seconds, while the one on the right always leaves you standing there for a few minutes before someone notices you waiting and finds you a table. You like the food in both, but over time, which restaurant will end up with more of your business? It's obvious that one cares more about customer experience than than the other. At an unconscious level, websites are no different to your customers. If your site is slow, why would a user choose to visit yours instead of a competitor with better service?
In real terms, this better user experience is proven to lead to lower bounce rates, and fewer abandoned carts. In research performed by the BBC, they found that every second longer they took to deliver their content, they lost 10% of their users. If you're wondering how your website stacks up, you can enter your website on Google PageSpeed Insights to find out.
What can you do about it?
If your website got above 80 in both desktop and mobile, great! Your customers aren't waiting too long for things to happen, and are able to visit the site efficiently.
If you were disappointed by the score, however, worry not, there are things you can do. The Insight page itself will have given recommendations on how you can improve it. You can give that to your developers and they should be able to make improvements. If they don't seem to be able to help you (remember, it's technically challenging and time-consuming), get in touch with us and we'll give you a free audit. We'll be able to help you identify the biggest and cheapest wins.
If you want to take the hassle away completely, you could also host with us. We are so confident in our ability to keep your site revved up to deliver on-demand, that we're willing to guarantee it. If you decide to host with us, we guarantee to get and maintain an 80+ Google PageSpeed Insights score on our Silver plan, 90+ score for our Gold plan, and an industry-leading 95+ on our Platinum plan. All sites are monitored hourly for speed, and you will receive a 1-hour credit for each hour that the site is less than the guaranteed level. In other words, you don't pay for hosting when your site doesn't perform like we say it will.
As part of your monthly hosting fee, we'll keep abreast of technological advances your site could benefit from, and automatically upgrade your site to take advantage of it. The one caveat is that there's a good chance, depending on the specific frameworks used in your site, that there will need to be a conversion process to be able to take advantage of the guarantee. We're happy to discuss those options and figure out how difficult it would be.
Why us?
I'll just leave this here.
We edited the screenshots above to have them sit side by side, but the actual results were unaltered. It feels great seeing that result on your own site. It's like getting A+ in high school all over again. Thanks Google. We want to achieve the same thing for yours. Please let us. We recognize that we might have a speed problem.
Algorithms & Automation
As a necessary requirement for being fast, we put a lot of emphasis on using proven algorithms, or developing our own, to do the job efficiently.
If something is repeatable, it can become a process, and you can take advantage of the time benefit of automation.
If you have a real-world processing problem, and are looking for an efficient improvement, contact us, and we might be able to help develop algorithms to suit your needs. It can be in traffic management, manufacturing processes, logistics, data analysis, capture and sharing - many problems can be solved with the appropriate use of algorithms.
AI & Machine Learning
Our philosophy of automation naturally leads us to believe that the future of technology is going to be heavily driven by data and AI.
This includes the simple AI that will be a part of the Internet of Things revolution (IoT), as well as the more complex AI that is used in markets, and data processing.
We use this knowledge to drive our research, and experiment with internal projects to develop new technologies.
Any project you take with us will benefit from this research.
Crypto-Currencies
Attracted to the bleeding edge, we have a deep interest in the advent of Bitcoin and Blockchain technology.
If you are interested in building secure bitcoin applications, or want to know how it can help your specific organization, we can help. We have written open source tools and contributed to the bitcoin ecosystem, and we expect the blockchain to play a big part in future of the IoT.
Productivity Scripts
At Blistering Developers, one of our core products are scripts to make things faster
If you regularly spend time on a repetitive computer task, such as collecting or formatting data, we can usually turn what might take hours into a few seconds and save you potentially hundreds of hours every year. Granted, not everything can be sped up, but if it's possible, we can create an algorithm and write a script for you to automate it.
Research & Development
When not actively engaged on an external project, we stare intently at the screen, contemplating life's ups and downs while sipping orange flavoured hot chocolate. Much of the time, we'll be wondering how we could write software to help. Sometimes, we'll hear about new software and we'll decide to spend some time learning about what makes it special.
This has led us to become quite good at benchmarking things. We like to know what's faster because we believe efficiency is at the heart of fast computing and lower costs. If you have complex systems which you want to speed up or are troubled by bottlenecks you'd like a fresh pair of eyes on, get in touch and we'd be glad to help.