Michael Melen

Time Doctor Made our Website Development Process 35% More Efficient.

Michael Melen

smartsites.com

Back in college, Michael Melen dabbled in SEO.

When he got out of school, the dabbling continued. This included consulting with the likes of Disney and Budweiser on their digital marketing campaigns. Then, in April 2011, Michael and his brother Alex opened a New Jersey based marketing agency called SmartSites to help companies succeed online.

In order to achieve this goal for their clients, SmartSites creates “distinguished brand identities, develops results driven websites, and creates online marketing that produces results.”

To help accomplish these initiatives for their clients as affordably as possible, SmartSites deployed Time Doctor to make their processes more efficient.

One such process is website development for their clients. Time Doctor gives Michael and Alex insights into the performance of their development team. These insights allow the founders to analyze where the developers are spending their time, what they are struggling with, and how to better utilize their skillsets.

For instance, one coder may be better at PHP while another coder may be better at Javascript. In this case, each coder will be deployed to best utilize his or her strength.

Over time, these insights have lead to a 35% increase in efficiency to the overall website development process from start to finish.

35% Increase

In efficiency in the total website development process from start to finish.

80 Hours Saved

The amount of coding time went from 200 hours to 120 hours per website.

Three Favorite Time Doctor Features

Ease of Use

Ease of Use

Onboarding a new developer to Time Doctor is incredibly easy. Michael simply sends an email invite to the developer and he is up and running within minutes. From Michael’s point of view, this is a hands-off process.​

Tracks Multiple Screens

Tracks Multiple Screens

When trying to analyze his team using a competitor’s product, Michael was only able to see half of their work. This is because the competitor's software could only see one monitor connected to a computer at a time. Time Doctor tracks every monitor connected to a computer.

Reporting

Reporting

If a client asks how long a project took to complete, Michael can get this information in 3 clicks.

“Before Time Doctor, we were shooting in the dark...”

...Which is especially alarming for SmartSites’ fixed price business engagement model.

Several of SmartSites’s clients have projects with an extremely well defined scope of work. Usually these projects are WordPress sites with a certain number of pages and don’t include many “special” elements.

Before Time Doctor, Michael couldn’t be certain that these sites were always profitable. A scary notion for a self-funded business that relies on its customers for growth. With Time Doctor's time tracking for agencies, SmartSites has been able to create a predictable cost structure for their fixed-price business engagements that ensure both affordability and profitability.

What would you say to an agency looking to use Time Doctor?

“Don’t use it, so that I can keep the advantage.”