Web design. It’s a business laced with buzz words and self-appointed gurus centered on building online presence, designing mobile apps and managing social media. How do you differentiate yourself?

Do it differently every time.

That’s the approach of Dev Digital, a Nashville web design and programming company. Dev Digital — which had revenue of more than $1 million in 2011 — has averaged 40 percent growth for each of the past four years. And that’s without tackling what the company terms the “flashy” stuff.

Founding partners Mitch Ballard and Peter Marcum said they take a slow, methodical approach in an industry that is otherwise buzzing. On the client level, that means tailoring a product — a website, an app, a Facebook page — to meet specific needs.

“We don’t come in and say, ‘Here’s how programming works and you need to make it work to fit your business model,’ ” Ballard said.

Instead, Dev Digital develops a new product or web-based business process, or heavily adapts what it already does. The company has done a broad range of projects since its inception four years ago, many of them highly specialized.

An example is an online tour management system used by acts such as Rascal Flatts and Jason Aldean — a back-office product in stark contrast to Dev Digital’s range of Facebook pages driving major traffic.

About 25 percent of the company’s business is tied to the music industry, and Dev Digital also is working on large health care projects. Along the way, the company has developed many products that are proprietary, which has meant heavy investment, Marcum said.

“That’s a get-rich-slow scheme, and it’s not very sexy,” he said. “But I think there is a key differentiator for us.”

The growth has meant going from a handful of people to nearly 50, and the company recently renamed itself from WV Magic Web Design, an inherited name from a previous parent company. After all, if you’re going to be different, you need your own identity.

Source : http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/print-edition/2012/07/27/dev-digital-nashville.html