Over 10 years ago, Built By Buffalo’s founder Dan Griffiths decided to break away from the usual graduate career path in order to found his company.
Starting off making Flash games, Dan quickly found his passion lay in web design and founded Built by Buffalo with a clear mission: to create great websites which work well and look amazing. Whilst the design landscape has become increasingly complicated and functionally diverse, Buffalo has managed to continuously build its reputation by staying true to this founding ethos.
In the early days Dan built Buffalo in a truly entrepreneurial fashion; figuring things out as he went. Starting with a small team, which included a designer and a developer, he found himself getting involved in all aspects of the business, from design and client management to the occasional dangerous moonlighting as a sysadmin.
Over the past couple of years Buffalo has steadily grown to its present team of fourteen designers and developers, who specialise in everything from UX to e-commerce integration. The team works with clients such as TedxBrighton and Greenpeace to build sites which not only look amazing, but also have high uptime, performance, and security.
Working in partnership with Bytemark, Built by Buffalo are able to meet each individual client’s hosting requirements, whether that’s through managed or dedicated services.
Wanting to find out more about his business and explore exactly how Bytemark has supported it, we caught up with Dan to ask a few questions:
What do you think makes Built by Buffalo Unique?
I think it’s our creative work that makes people really excited about wanting to come and work with us. This was clearly apparent when the current Buffalo website went live, as people reacted very well to it and we definitely saw an increase in people getting in touch for projects.
We also have an equal mix of creative and technical expertise within our team, which enables us to focus on the business elements of the site, alongside design and functionality. This is really important as I really do think you have to make time to understand the results a client is expecting from a project.
Our approach to our work is also something I’m very proud of - we are always honest about everything we do. We will tell clients if we think something could be better, or if we disagree on certain elements, which generally goes down really well as people want experts to guide their projects rather than just execute them.
What do you see the company doing in the future?
I’d love to be in a position where we can look at picking projects to work on that have an impact such as working with charities or local brands we love in Brighton.
We are also looking to do more to show off the skills of the team in a more casual way by developing more things under the Buffalo brand. For example, we are currently working on two sticker packs for iOS and want to launch an online shop at some point next year, showcasing bits and pieces designed by the team.
Why Bytemark?
Right at the beginning in 2006 we went to the Internet World exhibition looking for a hosting company that we could partner with. At the show we met Matthew (one of Bytemark’s founders), who was smart and approachable; a nerd who just loved servers and Linux!
I just got a good feeling from him; he was knowledgeable and was interested in helping us, even though we were a micro company at that time. He just seemed to care about what he was doing, which was very different from some of the corporates who were also exhibiting.
The main reason I continue to recommend Bytemark is down to the quality of support. I have rung up on numerous occasions with issues, which have always been dealt with in a very personable manner. This is something which has stayed the same throughout 10 years of being a customer.
We expect excitement and passion for the people who work here, our clients and also any supplier that we work with too. Wherever we can, we try and recommend Bytemark and I’m never disappointed with the results.
How does Bytemark support your work?
We initially started out in 2006 with a dedicated server for ourselves which hosted our website, alongside a couple of client sites. Getting started was an extremely transparent and simple process. We now have a few clients that we recommend managed hosting for and we’ve also taken a few clients that have dedicated servers.
We actually still essentially have the same box as when we started with Bytemark, but since then it’s been upgraded and changed as our needs have changed and grown. In the future we will probably be looking to take more custom clustered approach in order to spread resources and help with speed and availability.