About

Notebleu is a Design and Technology Company in Seattle, Washington. We collaborate with companies, organizations and institutions of all shapes and sizes, offering a warm, inspired environment. Our projects are diverse, but they share a focus on forward-thinking technology and results-focused design.

Team

Will started Notebleu in 2009 and has been working since then to hone his craft and approach. When Will comes across problems he hasn’t solved before, he approaches them with a combination of creativity, experience, and a willingness to learn.

Courtney has worked in design for thirty years and at Notebleu since 2015. His background ranges from design for small non-profits to international corporations. Courtney combines skill and experience in UX design with exceptional artistic ability.

Our Name

Our name is derived from a term Chopin used to describe the opening voice of his improvisations, and we think of the Notebleu as the seed of creativity. We offer information architecture and analysis, user experience design, visual design, and full stack development services to a growing list of partners around the United States.

Our Process

Your website is a critical part of your brand. High performance, tight security, and wide discoverability of your website are paramount to maintaining success. Over fifteen years in business, Notebleu has developed rigorous processes to ensure the sites we support meet the highest possible standard. We continually re-assess and improve our approach as technology and the marketplace evolve. A full review of our process is available here, but let’s be honest, it’s a bit dense… Consider this the tl;dr version.

Our Approach in a Nutshell

We believe there are five fundamental principles in website development.

1. Performance
2. Stability
3. Accessibility
4. Security
5. Search Engine Optimization

Performance

Your website comprises many layers of technology, all of which impactsite speed. We approach performance from the bottom up, tuning servers, tweaking code, and distributing loads so that your users will experience the least possible latency while navigating your site.

Stability

You rely on your website for your bottom line, so your website needs to be reliable. Our approach to website stability ensures that issues are caught quickly and resolved proactively.

1. We set systems to monitor your website and critical functionality 24 hours a day, reporting service interruptions immediately.
2. We develop a list of essential functions on your website and test them every time we patch software on your servers and content management system.

Accessibility

At Notebleu, we consider accessibility the foundation of every website. We believe that a clear user interface and great content benefit every user (and search engines too). We also take a meticulous approach to accessibility for users with impairments. We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2) and use a specialized tool during development that points out accessibility issues.

Security

We take security seriously at Notebleu because we know that security-related issues can have an outsized impact on your business and users. Our approach includes many processes that boil down to these guidelines:

1. We regularly renew our training through the SANS Institute on network security and writing secure software.
2. We test any software that we write with an automated tool that searches for vulnerabilities.
3. We always research the security posture of the software we are using (WordPress, plugins, programming language, server software, etc.).
4. We always assess the risk of every component we are using and do not implement components where we judge the risk to be higher than the benefit of use.
5. We monitor security news, especially as it relates to the platforms we use.
6. When the security news reports vulnerabilities, we patch and verify them immediately.

Search Engine Optimization

We believe that some have unfairly categorized Search Engine Optimization as magic and mysticism. In reality, search engines are just systems that do their best to guide users to relevant content. The more a search engine can know about your content and its relevance to users, the higher your search results will be. We help our clients with the infrastructural elements of SEO by auditing their websites with an automated tool that points out areas for improvement. These often include:

• Improvements to underlying HTML
• Advanced meta-data
• Performance and stability improvementsWe then work with our clients on content strategy geared at improving content in a way that is helpful both to search engines and users. We also help our clients with link building, which proves the underlying value of your content to search engines.nce the fundamentals are in good shape and search engines can see both the theoretical and applied value of your content, we use search engine marketing to get your content in front of more users. Or approach to every step of SEO is data-driven, with a model of continuous improvement.