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If there were ever a proverb that rang true in the business world it’s ‘time is money’. Whether it’s saving time and making more money, or making less money because things take up too much time… time is money. We embody this idiom here at Limelight Online, which is why we try to afford our clients with both more time and more revenue by way of custom web development. We love coming up with innovative tools our clients can use to boost efficiency, saving them time, stress and money.

What is custom development?

When we talk about custom web development, it’s a broad term that can apply to both e-commerce retailers and service-providing companies, and can encompass many things including complex business directories, online booking tools and loads more. Today we’ll concentrate on two custom development areas, the first being seamless integration of your website and an accounting or inventory management system that sees the goods and services your customers view on your website synced with your tangible goods and services. If your website takes orders but still leaves you to manually process orders and invoices, that’s a lot of time and energy you’re burning up unnecessarily. We can connect your website with business accounting and inventory management software including Unleashed, Xero, Harmoniq and MoneyWorks.

The second area is the creation of unique web tools that can make your work life easier – tools specially tailored to your company that boost efficiency and productivity by replacing time-consuming manual tasks with clever digital automation.

Integration with accounting and inventory management software

Around four years ago our parent company, Apex Digital, formed a relationship with Esko, New Zealand’s premium brand of safety products. They were shopping around for a web development company to provide integration between their website and their inventory management system,. At the time there wasn’t a lot of documentation around about how to go about this, which scared of a lot of other web developers off because it would require a high level of self-belief and the ability to blaze one’s own trail. Never afraid of a challenge, our development team stepped up to the mark when others put the Esko job in the ‘too-hard’ basket. With a lot of hard work, we synced Esko’s inventory with their website allowing for price checks in real time, customer account creation, syncing of product information, the creation of orders and a whole lot more.

About the same time, we started working with Southern Woods, a Christchurch plant nursery, and in a similar scenario to the Esko project, there was little documentation about how to integrate their website with their accounting and inventory management software. Again, our developers didn’t waiver at the lack of guidance available and went about following their well-developed developer noses to work through any issues and create a steadfast connection between the two that would reliably sew together Southern Woods website, aspects of their order fulfilment and their accounting.

Creating customised web tools to save time and money

Being a digital marketing and web development business with a collaborative team approach, we’re perfect candidates to be using customised web tools, so we made our own! The customised tool we simply refer to as our Online Database marries together quote and project creation, by assigning and timekeeping of tasks involved with each project, and accounting of each job. It replaces manual document creation and population with dropdown options and themes to help us create and collaborate on quotes all in the one place with standardised and specialised options available. This then creates a project that formulates job sheets, purchase orders and services for invoicing. From here it all feeds into a third-party project management app that allows us to assign tasks to team members and log time spent on each job. Clever stuff that makes a potential administrative nightmare involving umpteen programs a stress-free and streamlined proposition.

A more simplistic example of a timesaving web tool is the WordPress plug-in we designed for Star Media, a multimedia company who wanted a faster and error-free way to upload digital editions of their publications. Their original method of manually uploading files was a time-consuming process requiring training and allowing instances of human error. The custom plug-in we developed is a simple form with three required fields and an optional description field. This gets uploaded and categorised on the web e-reader platform, Yumpu. With each new upload our plug-in refreshes the sync between Star Media’s website and Yumpu, extracting the new issue and displaying it on the Digital Edition page of Star Media's own website.

Custom development and ongoing support to be proud of

Any custom development work we carry out is painstakingly tested to ensure there are no bugs, digital communication errors, or administrative errors at the client’s end. We don’t rest until we achieve a product we’re proud to put our name behind.

Our finished product is backed up with any necessary training plus ongoing support from our friendly team who are seasoned in converting complex tech speak into every day language. If you’d like to learn more about how we could use custom web development to help you boost your businesses’ efficiency while saving time and money, read on here or drop us a line.