services
Operating continuously since the web standards era.
Strategists, designers, engineers, and marketers on one team.
Across B2B, e-commerce, education, publishing, finance, and hospitality.
We came out of the web standards movement, so accessibility, semantic structure, and designing for devices nobody has shipped yet have been part of the practice from the beginning. We were building responsive, accessible sites before clients thought to ask for either. That same instinct is why we had machine learning running in production in 2013 and why we're building MCP servers now.
You paid for research, got a thoughtful document, and then handed it to a different firm to execute. Somewhere in that handoff the reasoning goes missing, the compromises start, and what ships bears a loose resemblance to what was recommended. We've inherited enough of those projects to know where they break.
Your SEO report is up, the paid media dashboard is green, the redesign tested well, and revenue is flat. This is what happens when each channel optimizes the number it owns and nobody is accountable for the number that matters. It's the most common thing we get hired to untangle.
Almost every company we talk to has run an AI proof of concept, and far fewer have anything in production that a customer touches. The gap is rarely the model. It's usually data access, governance, and the absence of anyone willing to own what happens when the thing gets an answer wrong.
Most engagements pull from several. Some are a single phase with a defined deliverable, and that's a perfectly good way to work with us.
Our strategy team starts with stakeholder interviews, then runs facilitated workshops on brand attributes, competitive position, and content strategy. One of the exercises establishes who you're not, which tends to be more clarifying than establishing who you are. Quantitative work runs alongside it, including analytics review, search demand analysis, and whatever survey or win-loss data already exists, so the recommendation rests on something firmer than the loudest voice in the room.
Our design practice covers positioning, naming, verbal and visual identity, content strategy, and information architecture. The framework we work from treats design as participatory rather than presentational, so the people who have to live with the brand help shape it while there's still time to change things. Accessibility goes in from the first wireframe, and our team stays current on WCAG standards, which is a habit that predates anyone putting it in a contract.
Our engineers help you choose and sequence the platforms you'll be living with for the next five years. We're one of fewer than twenty WordPress VIP Premier Partners worldwide, a Stripe Premier Partner, and a Craft Verified Partner carrying all three of Craft's designations (Craft, Commerce, and Enterprise), and we also build on Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok, Shopify, Laravel, and fully headless architectures. We've been working with Craft since before it was called Craft. Holding designations across several platforms is what lets the recommendation be honest, because we have no one platform to sell you. The work covers replatforming sequences, content modeling, integration mapping, and the build-versus-buy calls.
Our development groups do the building. For Capital One we built the iOS and Android apps their small business customers use, running on Tap to Pay and Stripe Connect. For MIRC we built a custom ERP and web application to track inbound and outbound shipments and tie it into their e-commerce platforms. We've been building on Stripe for over a decade, with certified Stripe implementation architects on staff, and we were one of Stripe's first partners.
Search stopped being ten blue links, so this work now covers three surfaces at once: traditional organic, answer engines including Google's AI Overviews, and generative assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. The technical foundation still decides most of it (crawl health, Core Web Vitals, schema, and internal linking), and on top of that we structure content to be retrieved and cited rather than only ranked, then track share of voice across the assistants themselves.
Our media team plans and runs paid search, paid social, programmatic display, CTV, audio, and retargeting, and we hold direct seats on the major demand-side platforms, so the platform recommendation isn't shaped by inventory we need to move. Every ad account stays in your name.
AI isn't a seventh service here. It's a decision inside each of the six, and the interesting question is always which parts of a workflow it should touch. Our AI practice covers knowledge base unification, custom MCP servers and APIs that give models access to live proprietary data, semantic search, agentic workflows, and conversational systems. We've been running it in production since 2013, which is long enough to be specific about where it belongs and where it doesn't.
Measurement is the thing that lets the other six be argued about honestly. If the numbers can't be trusted, no recommendation can be checked and every channel gets to claim the win. Our analytics team handles GA4 and GTM implementation, server-side migrations, offline conversion import so closed-won outcomes flow back to the ad platforms, and media mix modeling where the spend justifies it.
We won't start design until discovery is finished. That sounds obvious, and it's the single most common place these timelines break.
Our strategy lead talks to the people who own the outcome and the people who live with the current system, separately, because they almost never describe the same problem.
Usually two hours with everyone in the room at once, covering brand attributes, competitive position, and content strategy. We send pre-work ahead of time so the session gets spent on decisions rather than introductions. Working through it together in real time is what lets every visual and verbal decision afterward trace back to something the group actually agreed to.
We bring back what we heard, where the current experience stands against it, a recommended direction with positioning and guiding principles, early visual concepts, and the search and analytics implications. You sign off in that meeting, which is why we bring concepts to it instead of saving them.
We sequence the work into phases you can fund, with estimates by role and a plain statement of what each phase unblocks and what it depends on.
Each phase is scoped and priced on its own, and you can stop after any of them. The roadmap is written to be handed to whoever ends up doing the work.
How long discovery takes depends on the size of your organization, how many stakeholders we need to talk to, and how much usable research already exists. We'll give you a timeline before we start, and we'll tell you if something we find along the way changes it.
West Monroe came to us for a website and stayed for the media program. Our team rebuilt the site around their actual positioning, then took over search engine marketing, and the paid program finished pacing to exceed its revenue target by 60 percent. Strategy, design, development, analytics, and paid media all ran in one place, which is the only reason the site and the campaigns ended up saying the same thing.
Read the West Monroe case study →Since 2020 we've worked with the Central Park Conservancy, the official caretakers of the park, to build the definitive Central Park website, with a CMS, maps, and a great deal underneath. It rolled out in phases through the pandemic and after it, which is the honest version of what a multi-year roadmap looks like: sequenced so each phase could be funded and shipped on its own.
Read the Central Park case study →&pizza brought us in during the pandemic to rethink how ordering worked, and that engagement never really ended. The digital transformation came first, then a headless CMS, and eventually a generative AI assistant that took routine questions off the support queue so the team could spend time on the ones that needed a person. It's a useful example of AI arriving late in a relationship, once we understood the operation well enough to know what was safe to hand over.
Read the &pizza case study →A few more outcomes where we can share the number but not yet the name.
Return on ad spend improvement within six months, for a direct-to-consumer eyewear brand, on a mature paid program we took over.
Conversion lift for a B2B life sciences company after a site rebuild and an integrated media program.
Drop in cost per acquisition in 90 days, for an education publisher.
You get a recommended direction, a positioning statement, guiding principles the later work has to answer to, and a phased roadmap with estimates by role. Happy Cog also delivers the underlying research: stakeholder interview findings, competitive analysis, analytics review, and search demand data. The roadmap is the part clients use most, because it sequences the work into phases you can fund one at a time rather than as one large approval.
Yes, and a lot of clients do. Each phase is scoped and priced on its own, so you can buy discovery and stop, or bring us in for only the discipline your internal team doesn't cover. We write the roadmap to be handed to whoever ends up building from it, including your own developers or another agency. Happy Cog would rather do one phase well and earn the next than sell a program you didn't need.
Digital strategy decides what to do, and digital transformation is the multi-year program of doing it. A strategy engagement is measured in weeks and produces decisions and a roadmap. Transformation covers the platform migrations, process changes, and organizational shifts that follow. Most of our clients start with the strategy work because it's the cheaper way to find out whether the transformation they're imagining is the one they actually need.
We scope discovery as a fixed-fee phase with a defined deliverable, so you know what you're getting and what it costs before it starts. What drives the number is the size of your organization, how many stakeholders and audiences are in scope, and whether the output covers brand, platform, and media or only one of them, which is why Happy Cog quotes it per engagement rather than off a rate card. Pricing the strategy phase separately from the build means you can decide about the build after you've seen the recommendation.
Sometimes not, and we'll tell you when that's the case. If you have clear positioning, agreement among stakeholders, and a content model that works, we can go straight to design and development. The times it's worth doing anyway are when stakeholders describe the problem differently, when the last redesign didn't fix what it was supposed to, or when a platform decision will be expensive to reverse.
We build what we recommend. Our strategists sit with the designers and engineers who'll ship the work, so recommendations get pressure-tested against what's actually buildable and affordable before they reach you. It also means the reasoning behind a decision stays in the room while the thing gets made, which is usually when the hard trade-offs show up.
No. We've been running AI in production since 2013, which is long enough to have a specific view about where it helps and where it creates risk you don't want. Plenty of our recommendations come back as no, or as not yet, or as yes with a person reviewing every output. In regulated categories especially, we'll steer you toward keeping humans in the loop on anything that could affect a customer negatively.
The senior people you meet in the pitch are the ones on the engagement. We're 87 specialists on a fully distributed team, and we staff strategy engagements with a strategy lead, a designer, an engineer, and an analytics person from the start, so platform and measurement constraints surface during discovery rather than after. You won't be handed to a separate delivery team once the contract is signed.
Roadmap decisions land inside the engagement itself, on the timeline we set with you at the start. After that it depends on what you build. Paid media and analytics changes usually show inside a quarter, conversion work follows the release schedule, and organic search and generative engine visibility take six to twelve months because that's how those systems work. We'll tell you which bucket each recommendation falls into rather than implying they all pay off at the same speed.
Tell us what's not working, or what you're trying to decide. We'll tell you what we'd do about it, whether that's a full program or a single phase, and whether we're the right people for it.
