About SMAT Web Design
Fort Worth-based website development firm focused on Small business website solutions and low-cost custom websites made simple. They have several ECommerce clients, as well as hundreds of Information Only sites. They strive to treat every client as if they are their only client. They know the importance of a well designed and developed website and they are only successful if their clients are successful.
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SMAT Web Design Reviews
Write a ReviewCustom ERP modules that fit our processes rather than forcing us to change them
Natalie Tremblay / Director of Engineering - Boreal Digital Inc
Verified
Dec 02, 2025
Dec 02, 2025
Project summary: Several previous vendor relationships had left us cautious. We needed a partner who would be honest about complexity upfront rather than discovering it mid-project.
Project governance was one of the things that impressed me most. We had a dedicated project manager who ran tight fortnightly sprints with clear acceptance criteria, a shared backlog that gave us full visibility at all times, and a change request process that was fair and transparent. Nothing slipped through the cracks, no bill shock at the end, and the final delivery matched the original scope document almost perfectly. In my experience that kind of discipline is genuinely uncommon.
PROS
Technical depth across the full stack, honest and timely communication, delivered exactly what was scoped without surprise additions to the invoice
CONS
The initial project brief document they required was more detailed than we were used to providing, but in hindsight that rigour was part of why the project ran so smoothly
Project TypeERP Development
IndustryEvents & Event Management
Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999
DurationMar 2025 – Apr 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Boreal Digital Inc, a mid-sized organisation in the Events & Event Management sector headquartered in Montreal, Canada. My remit as Director of Engineering covers everything from infrastructure to product development. We had reached a point where our internal engineering capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap without an experienced external partner.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Growth into new markets had exposed serious limitations in our platform. What had worked for our original user base in Montreal, Canada was not going to scale internationally, and the ERP Development requirements for those new markets were meaningfully different. We needed a partner who had solved that kind of problem before.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end ERP Development delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Events & Event Management infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Price was a factor but not the deciding one. They were mid-range in our evaluation. What tipped it was the combination of their technical depth in ERP Development, the seniority of the team they proposed to assign to our account, and the clarity of their project governance model. We had been burned by an agency that overpromised before and we needed to see evidence of process maturity.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Events & Event Management sector and did not need us to explain domain context that a less experienced team would have required. That background knowledge shortened the discovery phase meaningfully and reduced the volume of clarification questions during sprints.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new ERP Development platform has reduced our operational overhead measurably, our team spends less time managing incidents and more time on product development, and we have been able to onboard two new enterprise clients who had previously cited our technical limitations as a barrier.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The quality of the written communication. This matters more than most clients articulate. Clear, concise, technically accurate updates that our non-technical stakeholders could read and understand. Proposals and change requests that made the decision obvious rather than obscuring it in jargon. That communication quality reduced our internal coordination overhead significantly.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
I recommend them to anyone who asks and occasionally to people who do not. The combination of ERP Development expertise, Events & Event Management domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
Managed IT service that made helpdesk tickets feel like a thing of the past
Daan Visser / CTO - Tulip Tech BV
Verified
Jan 27, 2025
Jan 27, 2025
Project summary: We had a clear product vision but lacked the engineering capacity internally to execute it within the window our market opportunity required.
I am a demanding client. I have a technical background, I review code, and I have high standards for documentation and testing. This team met all of those expectations without ever seeming defensive about scrutiny. Peer code reviews were welcomed, unit test coverage was genuine rather than performative, and the API documentation was thorough enough that our own developers integrated against it without a single clarification call. That level of craft is what I look for and rarely find.
PROS
Consistent delivery against milestones, code quality that passed our internal review without major findings, post-launch support that felt like a partnership not a ticket queue
CONS
Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum
Project TypeIT Managed Services
IndustrySports & Fitness
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationJun 2025 – Sep 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Tulip Tech BV operates across the Sports & Fitness sector with offices in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In my capacity as CTO I oversee both the strategic and operational technology agenda. We are a growth-stage business that needed a development partner capable of scaling with us rather than constraining us.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate trigger was a performance failure during our peak trading period that cost us measurably in both revenue and client trust. The root cause was architectural and our internal team did not have the IT Managed Services expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end IT Managed Services delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Sports & Fitness infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Price was a factor but not the deciding one. They were mid-range in our evaluation. What tipped it was the combination of their technical depth in IT Managed Services, the seniority of the team they proposed to assign to our account, and the clarity of their project governance model. We had been burned by an agency that overpromised before and we needed to see evidence of process maturity.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Amsterdam, Netherlands and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new IT Managed Services platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Sports & Fitness business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The continuity of the team. The engineers who scoped the work were the engineers who built it. That sounds like it should be standard practice but in my experience it often is not. The institutional knowledge that comes from that continuity pays dividends at every stage, particularly when you are dealing with a complex Sports & Fitness domain where context takes time to build.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, without qualification. I have already made two direct referrals to peers in the Sports & Fitness sector who were facing similar IT Managed Services challenges. In both cases I gave the recommendation specifically because I was confident the experience would match what I described — which is a level of confidence I do not extend lightly.
Multiplayer backend that held up under launch-day load without a single crash
Sinead Gallagher / Director of Engineering - Celtic Digital Ltd
Verified
Nov 14, 2022
Nov 14, 2022
Project summary: Smart meter rollout had generated more data than our existing analytics infrastructure could process and we were losing value that should have been translating directly into grid efficiency gains.
The thing I appreciate most in retrospect is that they were honest when something was harder than expected. Twice during the project the team came to us proactively to say that a particular component needed more time to do properly and explained why cutting corners would create problems later. We gave them the time. Both decisions were correct. The resulting product is solid and we have had none of the post-launch instability that plagued our last two technology projects.
PROS
Collaborative working style that made them feel like an extension of our team, excellent written communication for our async timezone relationship, clean and readable codebase
CONS
Their calendar books up quickly which made scheduling the initial kickoff slightly challenging — a good problem for them to have and not one that affected our delivery
Project TypeGame Development
IndustryEnergy & Utilities
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationFeb 2025 – Mar 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Celtic Digital Ltd is a Energy & Utilities business based in Cork, Ireland. As Director of Engineering I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a product concept validated by market research but no clear path to build it within our budget and timeline constraints. Our Energy & Utilities competitors were moving quickly and we could not afford to spend eighteen months finding out a generalist agency could not execute the Game Development work our product required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was Game Development but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in Game Development and specific knowledge of the Energy & Utilities sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Quantitatively: user engagement metrics are up significantly since launch, our support ticket volume has dropped, and we have received unsolicited positive feedback from clients who noticed the improvement. Qualitatively: our internal team is proud of the product we now have, which affects morale and retention in ways that do not show up on a dashboard but matter enormously.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some agencies disappear the moment the final invoice is paid. This team maintained the same level of responsiveness during the hypercare period as during development, handed over thorough documentation without being asked twice, and checked in proactively a month after go-live to review performance metrics with us. That last part was entirely unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.
Company Info
Founded
2007
Employees
10 - 49
Hourly Rate
$100 - $149
Client Rating
5.0/5 (3 reviews)