Byte Technology

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the operations manager for www.teambottles.com, we sell and produce personalized sports accessories including water bottles, bag tags, and helmet decals.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Byte Technology, and what were your goals?

Our ecommerce site is a heavily customized WordPress site and needed some major renovations. At best it was difficult and cumbersome for our customers to use. Our site was designed in such a way that we could not update the version of WordPress without breaking the site. Our site was on the edge of obsolesce as most hosting providers stopped supporting the version of PHP our old site was running on.

We hired Byte to get our website and all the plugins updated to the latest versions and to add some new features and clean up the UX to make for a better customer experience.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We contacted and spoke with a wide range of vendors including larger firms and freelance developers. We decided to use Byte because they were very responsive, were local, and had a very impressive portfolio and had worked on similar projects. Additionally, they made some great recommendations on our onboarding call before we even started to work with them.

This demonstrated their expertise and experience and made the decision to work with them over other companies pretty easy. We are also a small company and had a limited budget to work with. Byte was able to work within our budget and helped guide us on what the best way to achieve our goals while maintaining our budget.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

After having an onboarding meeting we were put in touch with a lead developer that we would be working with. They set up a project for us in JIRA and it was very easy for us to populate our project board with the tasks we needed to complete.

Some of the tasks they worked on for us were migrating to a new host, removing outdated features on our website, implementing a guest checkout, integrating Customily into our product pages, and making sure our website was running the latest version of WordPress and plugins used on our site.

We also wanted to improve our UI/UX because we noticed people were visiting our site but leaving, this was likely due to confusion as it was not clear how to order our personalized products off our website.

Byte made great recommendations on how to improve the order flow and recommended we use Customily to preview / mock up designs on our product pages.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

After deciding to work with Byte we were put in touch with one of their lead developers that we worked with directly on our projects. They and another developer worked on our projects but we had one point of contact which made communication very easy.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Before we updated our sites we had to do a lot of "hand holding" to get orders placed. Now that our website is improved customers are submitting orders without needing to contact us first, this is a huge improvement!

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We used JIRA to manage our projects and communicate with the developers. I was also able to email our main contact and request a phone call with them whenever it was needed.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their experience and expertise was demonstrated from day one. Even before we decided to work with then Byte had given us some great recommendations on software to use. They are also very fast and responsive, projects were completed within the time and cost scope they quoted almost every time and when they needed more time to complete a task they were up front about it.

Their team of talented and competent developers is able to understand and implement the features we wanted to add and make to our site.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Honestly, no. Working with Byte has been an absolute pleasure and we look forward to continue working with them.