When contacting a designer about a new website, you should have a good, solid idea about what it is you want and be sure to communicate your ideas clearly in order to get the best result. If your description of what you want includes words like “kind of, sort of, maybe, whatever, wing it” or you give a vague description, you might want to spend some time determining what your needs are. This would include specific ideas about color or imagery, what kind of feeling it should convey or if there is an image you’d like to portray. A good foundation and some general instruction allows you to get the most bang for your buck.

It might be helpful to provide your designer with specific examples of sites you like and don’t like. We will never copy the work of another designer, but it helps us understand the styles you prefer. Of course, if you feel you aren’t sure or need guidance with branding or concept, we’re happy to provide it! Please make that clear to your designer and we will discuss our branding packages in our proposal.

If you see grey/beige/blue boxes behind any of the images or the site is wonky or looks nutty in any way, it’s most likely due to using Internet Explorer 6 or some other dated browser.  We realize many people (we mean you, IT departments!) still haven’t upgraded to IE7 yet, so we’ve done our best to make this site as viewable as possible, but we highly recommend upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 or another current browser, like Firefox.

On our Request for Proposal, we ask you if your project requires site migration.  This can apply to one or more of the following:

• Moving from one server to another on the same host.
• Moving from one host to another.
• Switching from one content management system to another (i.e. Blogger to Typepad, Typepad to Expression Engine, Movable Type to Blogger, one e-commerce to another, etc. et. al.)
• Your link or site structure changes and it requires link and/or feed redirection.

Site migration can be a time consuming process riddled with detail-oriented tasks, so it’s a major factor in project development.  To ensure your links, feeds and pages don’t “break” and are still easily found through Google without broken links and/or duplicate links (those really tick Google off!), we must take the time to migrate your site properly, so please assume that will be additional, in both time and budget.