How to choose a software development partner for years of work
A proposal shows the first three months. A partner's longest engagement, and who owned what in it, shows the years after.
Sixteen years as an agency's development team.
Anchor Wave designed and sold the websites; we built and looked after them, through thousands of tickets from 2009 to 2026.
A defined part of the agency’s work
Anchor Wave is a web design and marketing agency in Tucson, Arizona, founded in 2003. From December 2009 to March 2026 we were its development team. Anchor Wave owned strategy, its client relationships and most of the design; we built and looked after the websites.
Sixteen years, in four ways of working
From 2010 to 2015, jobs came to us as tickets in Anchor Wave's own system: 4,524 task assignments on record. They ran from page build-outs and design mockups to fixes and responsive conversions. From 2015 to 2018, each job had its own project with us: 414 of them.
From 2018 to 2025, every job ran through one shared ticket board: 1,687 tickets. From December 2025 to March 2026 we checked search reports and advised on pages, on demand.
What we built
WordPress and Elementor sites built page by page from Anchor Wave's designs, in drafts and revisions. Themes and plugins, WooCommerce shops, speed and accessibility work, hosting moves and migrations. In 2019 and 2020 we built and maintained the agency's WordPress starter theme, with contributions from its in-house developer. The theme was used across its sites. From 2015, our designers also made homepage mockups to Anchor Wave's design specs. The client sites we built, each with its dates and a capture from the time, are shared on request. Request access.
How the teams worked
Anchor Wave shared requirements and designs. Our engineers reviewed the brief, raised questions, built the agreed work and returned it for review. From 2020, time entry, access and quality checks were set down as shared process.
What it showed
The arrangement showed that a separate technical team can hold a defined responsibility inside another company's service, for sixteen years. We now work this way only as named partners. Why we changed.
Stack
The capabilities behind the work
From the blog
Async Communication with an outside development team, from 16 years of tickets
How Anchor Wave and LastDoor kept thousands of jobs moving for sixteen years in writing, with fewer than five meetings a year and a record of each job.
Bring us into the part your team needs.
Tell us about the work and the people already involved.
Discuss a partnership