Digital Garden

I had a similar experience to Kay Kramer's review below. I was working for a travel agency at the time who wanted a new website to be made to refresh their brand. It was a small business who spent $50,000 on their website. It was no small amount. I searched the web and encountered Digital Garden. The initial proposal sounded very professional and I ended up choosing their services, however it went all downhill after that.It dragged on well over the estimated initial time frame of 3 months to complete and ended up taking around 7 months to finish the website , which was not up to our expectations. We would be kept in the dark whenever I inquired about updates and how the website was going. Communication was poor there was no back and forth, I would always be told they are working on it. Two staff had also left during the period which made it worse. The end product was not what we envisioned and the service was poor. Changes that needed to be made were going to be charged for which could of been avoided if there was some communication given during the whole creation process. I have since left the travel agency and started my own business which is why I want other small business owners to be aware.

I've had the pleasure of working with Digital Garden for more than two years now.When we first engaged Digital Garden, we were a small two person startup with no real online presence to speak of. In the two years since, we've launched 6 market-leading websites in the careers and education sectors that have hundreds of thousands of monthly users across three countries.I say we could not have done this without Digital Garden with confidence, because I can compare their work to no less than four other drupal agencies/ freelancers that I've worked with in various capacities, both here in Australia and abroad. Prior to working with Digital Garden, we made a lot of mistakes and wasted a lot of money, but it has given me a strong point of reference to talk about what makes Digital Garden different.As a business without the internal resources to complete a project 'in-house', it's not enough to work with a technical 3rd party who just faithfully delivers the requested scope on time. In my opinion, just coding according to a set of instructions and timeline is a commodity (and one that doesn't justify the fees charged by most agencies in Australia). Digital Garden do deliver projects cleanly coded and on time, but you should be able to take this as a given. I've found Digital Garden goes above and beyond this in two main ways that, in my experience, are unique to their culture and way of approaching projects:1) Smart decision making partnerThere's a massive 'information asymmetry' that's inherent when working with external 3rd parties with technical expertise that you don't yourself have in-house - you're highly exposed and you're reliant on the 3rd party to make decisions/ recommendations that you're not equipped to properly interrogate yourself. If you're working with a 3rd party who see it as their role to deliver what's requested without question, this inevitably leads to problems. It's a classic case of 'you don't know what you don't know' - even if the project is delivered according to scope, if you haven't got the scope right, it's a bad businesses outcome.Digital Garden have not only delivered the projects, but they've been exceptional as a partner to help think through the commercial/ strategic/ user experience considerations in conjunction with the technical considerations. This, in my experience, is a very rare quality - many technical teams consider problems through a technical lens only. Digital Garden are great at singling out and questioning parts of a scope that need more thought. They can be relied on to ask 'is there a better way?' and suggest alternative approaches. It's not their style to faithfully deliver something that they know is wrong because that's what the client requested. Rather than take advantage of the 'information asymmetry' to maximise billable hours, on numerous occasions, they've questioned assumptions and requests that have resulted in scope being significantly simplified or reduced, with a better business outcome. In my experience, it's rare to find technical teams who have the ability to think about a product and make recommendations based on holistic commercial/ strategic/ user experience and technical considerations, but Digital Garden are exceptional at this and it really sets them apart.2) FlexibilityIn the two years we've been working with Digital Garden, the project and our needs as a client have constantly evolved. From a rapid delivery wireframe/design/build fixed scope project in two months over Christmas, to an ongoing hybrid internal / Digital Garden team working in fortnightly sprints, Digital Garden have constantly evolved their offering to meet our needs. They've taken on board feedback and bent over backwards to adapt to changes as we've grown rapidly, including mixing and matched teams, fee structures and workloads. I've found this openness and flexibility to be unique to Digital Garden, and it has been key to us working together with them for so long.

It was great working with Digital Garden on the global website for World Mosquito Program, the team were fantastic to collaborate with and presented innovative ideas and customised solutions to navigate a complex project.

I've been working on projects with Digital Garden for over 10 years now. Each project they are able to deliver beyond and above what I expected. Their process is solid and delivery always on time.Happy to recommend Digital Garden to anyone needing a web site, an app or anything digital.

In 2016, I was the in-house project manager for the design and development of a new website for an international humanitarian aid agency based in Sydney. Digital Garden was the successful tendering agency. I was confident in their experience and capacity to deliver what we needed. In the end we launched on time and on budget with a design that complemented our new ‘stories first’ content strategy. I was happy with the result.

Digital Garden is a seriously good company. Our requirements as Australia's leading asset consultant with over $350 billion under advice (JANA Investment Advisers) were critical to get right. Our once neglected website has been modernised and is now now managed by Digital Garden.I've watched the analysts at Digital Garden work through requirements discovery with our investment consultants - and deliver the results we wanted.On a technical level, Digital Garden will partner with us to build out our client facing portal and implement JSON API's that will talk directly with our back-end systems.This is a great business I would not hesitate to recommend.

Abby and the team are great to deal with. I used them in my capacity as a technology leader to upgrade an aging wordpress site. What I originally thought could be achieved by our restricted budget, was far exceeded in the design and validation process. Highly recommend.

Worked with Digital Garden to release a site for a large information repository site for Government Commission built in Drupal. Their developers worked alongside our UX team well and quickly built out features and functionality at our request or the clients. Highly recommend their team if you need a CMS done through Drupal.

Digital Garden always release first class digital products. They have a tried and tested process that delivers results. I highly recommend them as a Digital Agency.

Great company, great people