Featured Customer: Agile Pixel 

Can you give us a bit of background to Agile Pixel and your role there?

I am Dave, Lead Frontend Developer at Agile Pixel, a web development agency based in the UK.

We’re a collective of like-minded freelancer developers, a small team that’s dedicated to all things web development.

Working as a team we can help to build websites and web applications at scale, but as freelancers we are flexible and can easily integrate within other teams, take on small projects and be generally agile to our clients’ specific needs.

What does Agile Pixel specialise in?

We specialise in website development, we generally serve as the development arm of larger agencies, giving agencies the freedom to offer web development services, without needing a specific web development team.

Our speciality is in our flexibility being able to adapt to all development requirements, be those in frameworks and languages that we’re familiar with, PHP, Javascript, CSS, or languages that we don’t deal with on a daily basis, like ASP and Python.

We’re yet to hit a language that we’re unable to find a solution for. 

What is the secret of your success?

Our success seems to be mainly built upon being reliable and aggressively priced. 

We strive to always deliver projects on time, and to a high standard, this seems to be reflected in our clients’ support and dedication.

It’s surprising how often we’re picking up work where a development agency has let a client down, or not been able to deliver on their original project, be that budgetary or timescales.

Our clients come back time and time again because they know that if we say we will deliver that’s exactly what we’ll do. 

What do you love about what you do?

We take great pride in all our projects, be they small local shops for gardening, or larger businesses providing global boiler solutions, to sites for well known bands and beverages.

It’s great to see clients that we’ve worked with for years still using our products and solutions, even code that’s 10 years old is still working, and operating, easy to maintain and working with the latest technologies and versions of frameworks.

What are some of the challenges that you are facing, and how are you tackling them?

Our biggest challenge is always scale, it’s tempting to scale up, bring in a range of extra developers to give us more hands to builder larger or service more clients.

However, scaling up brings with it risks for quality control, and juggling more clients, so we often find ourselves trying to balance growth with sustainability and making sure our existing clients retain the level of service they’ve come to expect.

How do you use 20i’s Reseller Hosting?

We try to host as many sites as we can on the 20i Reseller Hosting platform. The confidence that a stable and fast service like 20i offers is at the core of what we do.

We can approach all new development knowing that with no hassle or complications we can have a hosting package available within minutes by hosting a site, offering emails etc…

Being able to say that our hosting is Green and listing the various green hosting credentials to clients really sets our hosting apart from other offerings.

Needless to say that the server stability is key to our clients and what we offer, being able to communicate with our hosting provider is a huge benefit to us, as we know that 20i is there to support us and offer advice and assurances to any queries that our clients may raise.
 
We host both small sites on the shared platform, predominantly WordPress sites, but a collection of other options as well, we also use the Managed Hosting offerings for larger sites and more complex or custom builds.

You have been with 20i for quite some time now. What made you stick with us?

We moved to 20i because it was an incredible combination of high-performance hosting at a price that’s unparalleled. We stayed because of the support of the 20i service desk, the performance of the servers and the stability of the overall system.

Having a managed hosting platform for the bulk of our services gives us peace of mind and allows us to focus on what we do best, website development.
 
Having confidence in the hosting service is really key to how we operate, as we invariably have to deal with other platforms depending on the specific client requirements. It’s quite eye opening, the variety of services, and how they’re accessed, how they look, where features are hidden etc…

20i is clean and clear, everything is where we expect it to be, and it’s easy to use.  It really is refreshing to use compared with other platforms.

We hope to build new sites, embrace new technologies and do the inevitable dance of all developers trying to stay ahead with the constantly emerging technologies.

What advice/wisdom would you like to share with the world?

Never stop learning, the web is ever evolving and there’s no way to compete if you’re not willing to grow and adapt.

We started back in the days of Actionscript thinking that it was the future of the web, had an affair with SCSS thinking CSS would never get better or easier to use, moving from Javascript to Typescript, flirting with Vue and React, whilst eyeing up SolidJS.

There’s so much to know it’s best to embrace that you’ll never know everything. As long as you’re willing to learn and adapt then there’s always a solution to every clients needs.