We do have phone numbers listed on our contact page, but due to the nature of our business and the focus required to do our jobs, we prefer to set up phone meetings by appointment only.  You are welcome to call during business hours, but you will most likely receive our voicemail unless it indicates on our contact page that we are available for open calls.  Please leave a message with your name, phone number, email address and a brief overview on your project and we will do our best to return your call by the next business day. 

Please remember that we do work from home, so if you call at 11pm on a Saturday night, you’ll not only get our voicemail, but potentially cranky designers, as well.  Unless it is truly an emergency (in which case, leave a detailed voicemail and we will get back to you as soon as possible), we would appreciate your respect of our weekends and personal time.  Drop us an email and we’ll look into your issue on the next business day.

Well, that’s a bummer.  But, unfortunately, the answer is no.

As independent business owners of a very small 2-woman firm, we rely on timely payments from our clients to ensure our livelihood and the livelihood of those we contract with.  Once your deposit and/or engagement agreement has been received, your project is accepted in good faith and other projects are often turned away.

No refunds are permitted under any circumstances.  Your deposit is a retainer of our time, secures your position in our schedule and covers the costs preliminary consultation and expertise.  If you change your mind, that is unfortunate, but again, no refunds are permitted. Ever.

Your project launching in a timely manner is how we keep our business moving forward.  We are motivated and have a vested interest in keeping it cookin’.  We are counting on the remaining balance of your project and we take your word and our engagement agreement quite seriously.  If you choose to halt the project temporarily or otherwise place the project on hold for any length of time for any reason, a continuation fee will be accrued, per your engagement agreement, until the project resumes.  Please see more in your Project Proposal.

In other words, SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY, please.  If you’re not ready and you’re just looking to get an idea of what things might cost, that’s totally OK! But, please bear in mind that we work from a lengthy waiting list of eager beavers, so please don’t commit to a project if you’re not 100% certain you are motivated. Changing your mind mid-project throws a monkey wrench in the flow, so to speak.  So, please… and we say this with nothin’ but love, help us help you.

We would love to accept every request for assistance that comes our way… we’re helpful girls like that.  If our schedules permit, we’ll do our best to accommodate last-minute requests, but we are usually booked with new design projects and/or maintenance for our existing clients.  There are often talented and knowledgeable support staff provided by both your hosting provider and your content management/blog platform developers. They know their stuff and they work hard for the money. So hard for it, honey.

But, if you’re into DIY, your blog platform/content management system will usually provide documentation and community support forums on their websites.  You may find some resourceful links in our sidebar and we also recommend the talented programming services of Media Girl. They’re the cat’s pajamas.

Sometimes the Internet gets a little kooky: your site goes offline or you can’t access your email and that can make one… we’ll say “tense”.  We’ve soooooo been there!  But chances are it’s not a result of something we’ve done or anything that we can fix, especially at midnight on Sunday.  So, if your site is offline, you’re not getting your email or your mother-in-law just showed up unannounced on your doorstep, please submit a support ticket with your hosting provider (the people who manage the servers where your site lives), not your designers (that’s us).  Of course, if you do have an urgent issue that we can help with (or you just don’t know), please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sorry, Abe. We do keep copies of our projects and they are eventually burned onto disk and archived. Occasionally, due to hard drive failure or other technical difficulties, there may be designs we just don’t have the back-up files for. It is ultimately the clients responsibility to maintain copies of your files. Per your project agreement, a back-up of art and original templates will be provided via .zip file or via USPS on CD once final payment has been received.

If you were expecting magic or fairy dust, we don’t blame you, but we’re sorry to disappoint.    We’re old friends with the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes Photoshop and Illustrator, our two main tools.

For development of HTML and CSS, once in a while, one of us will bust out an old basic text editor like Homesite, but most of the time we write our markup with plain ol’ Notepad.  Neither of us uses Dreamweaver, Frontpage or anything like that.  In fact, we avoid them at all costs.  It just bloats the code like bad PMS.  We like to keep it simple.

To manage the content on our websites, we use a variety of blog platforms, content management and services, but our favorites are Wordpress and Expression Engine.

For hosting, we like HostMonster and Hosting Matters, but there are others listed in the FAQ sidebar that you might prefer.

That’s about it!

No, indeed.  Please see “Will you build us a huge site for free?”

Nope. No, we sure won’t. That is, unless you are offering to pay all of our bills for a year. Then we might consider it. While we’d love to be able to offer free services, be it “just a quickie” or a full-blown site, we just can’t keep a roof over our heads doing so. If you are a current or prospective client, we are happy to answer any questions you may have. But, if you’re looking to see how much friendly assistance you can get for free, please keep on truckin’.

Whether you realize it or not, what you’re asking for is called “spec work” (short for ‘speculative’) and we don’t jive with that.  If you’re seeking an experienced designer with integrity, you shouldn’t jive with “spec” either.  We encourage you to read more about spec work and learn why it’s the design industry equivalent of flatulence at a dinner party.

While that sounds delightful and we could really go for a salad, unless you’re in San Diego, CA or Palm Beach, FL, chances are slim that we will be canoodling over breadsticks at the local Olive Garden. But, never fear! We’re quite skilled with this newfangled email thing. A few notes back and forth and we’ll have your new site live in two shakes. First time? We’ll be gentle.

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.