In order to best serve you, we’ve rounded up the most common questions and comments that come through our inbox and done our best to answer them as thoroughly as we can right here. If you still have a question that we haven’t answered here, please feel free to drop us a line. We’ll do our best to respond as quickly as possible.
This depends on the project. Each website is unique and may require more or less time to build. Factors such as how quickly you communicate with your designer about design decisions and how well you express your wishes can influence the final timeline. Building a site is an exact process, so once your design is finalized, the site still needs to be coded, implemented and tested. This process can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months depending on the size of the site and the availability of your designer.
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.
A blog or “weblog” is online journaling that has become widely popular. The tools that spawned from blogging have great features that we see being extremely beneficial to business websites, too. These blogging tools or Content Management Systems (CMS) can really enhance the performance of a website and create ease for the site owner in making basic updates to its content. Fresh content and updated content is key to keeping your visitors coming back and keeping them informed. It allows you to communicate with your customers in a real way. Most CMS tools have a web-based control panel that you can log into and edit or post updates to your site without ever having to mess with complicated code. It can be used to post news, photos, or it can be used to pull in news feeds from other related sites. There are so many possibilities and quite a few platforms to choose from. Consider picking up our book The IT Girls’ Guide to Blogging with Moxie for more in-depth information!
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.
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.
Because then you wouldn’t be getting us, darlin’. 
We like being a small design firm. We’re control freaks like that. We’re not looking to take over the world (only like, a third. OK, half.), we just want to produce fun, creative design for wonderful people who aren’t looking for the same stinky ol’ templates. If you’re looking for an assembly line of crap on command, you’ve come to the wrong place.
This isn’t to say we won’t be hiring some assistants or contracting with developers at some point in the future.
