Building A High-Performance Website: Why Web Developers Should Be Problem Solvers

A robust website can—and should be—a powerful revenue source. It can also cause ruthless problems if you don’t have web developers who know what they’re doing. 

Customers won’t stick around (nor will Google search crawlers) for web apps and pages that load slowly. If website visitors are unable to interact with your site quickly and efficiently, checkout and pay, and find what they are looking for, you’re out of luck. You can kiss new customers goodbye and watch your bottom line drop. 

But… that’s precisely what happened to one of our new customers. 

A small but complex veterinarian research and eCommerce organization was feeling website aches and pains daily. Multiple 3rd parties developed web applications, WordPress plugins were continually out-of-date, and integrated systems weren’t “talking” to each other. Issues were not only squandering sales and opportunities but stealing precious time from a small team that was already working at full capacity. What made the situation worse was they had a website maintenance company on retainer that would look at an issue and say “not my problem.” 

Their website was a productivity black hole.

They were feeling the frustrating effects of a reactive approach to development. What the company needed was a dedicated web development team with a problem solver’s mindset to free up the internal team’s time. 

Problem solvers are engineers who employ a multi-pronged strategy to tackle existing issues and anticipate potential ones. Rather than viewing problems in a vacuum and applying fixes after things break, they look for ways to improve to avoid future problems. While your average web developer is capable of updating plugins or tracking down glitches in code, problem solvers task themselves with improving the whole versus patching the parts. Their eyes are always on the horizon.  

Problem solvers can improve tech skills, but if developers can’t problem solve, they’re going to get stuck. Observational skills, lateral thinking, and analytical abilities are all subsets of problem-solving, according to Career Builder, and without these skills, a developer is likely to waste time and budget. You don’t want a developer who focuses too heavily on pruning the trees while neglecting the forest. 

As a full-stack software development company, we at American Web Devs are passionate about beautiful technology. Still, we know tools only go so far without problem-solvers powering them. Reach out and learn about our holistic approach to making your company’s website, apps, and software work for you.