Getting Started

We don’t start things off by jumping right into Photoshop. Instead, we come to your office. Whether it’s by phone, webinar, or personal meeting, we sit and listen to your needs. We just want to hear you talk about your business, your customers, and your vision.

After that, we still don’t go right to Photoshop.

We think. A lot.

The Numbers

Once we have all of the information that we need it’s time to start putting the numbers together. Clients will usually submit an RFP in order for us to send them an estimate and statement of work. Steady clients usually just send an email saying what they need and when they need it. It’s much more informal and much simpler.

We will outline and email the following to you:

• The deliverables – both ours and those of the client. It describes what we will do for them and what we will need from them in order for us to do our job.
• The deadlines and milestones – timeline of the project, when the phases start, when they are due, etc.
• The project scope – Typically, our billing schedule is based on time and materials. We analyze the unique project needs to suggest a statement of work, then collaborate with the client to nail down the final version. If the client is requiring a fixed per-project pricing we require them to deliver the statement of work needed.
• The payment methods – whether we are doing fixed pricing or hourly.
• The task breakdown – what exactly we’ll do in order to complete the project.

This entire process will yield an estimate, our proposal of the total amount of resources (time, money, manpower) needed for getting the job done.

Getting Down To Work

We do our homework and work through navigational and usability issues long before we ever touch the computer. We examine the marketplace and construct a competitive analysis to find out what others are doing that works (and doesn’t work). We take into account your existing brand, logo, collateral and primary audience.

Then we ask lots of questions: What emotive response do you want visitors to your site to have? Is it really a redesign that you need, or would you be better off refactoring your existing model? What do you want this to be when it grows up? We go back to our headquarters and begin brainstorming. Actually, our heads and conversations have been spinning since we last chatted with you. The architect will begin masterminding his next creation and the design team will be sketching frantically for the next several days. After a day or two, the flutter of ideas will come together into a plan that we’re all excited about and can’t wait to present in colorful detail to your inbox. After your sign off, we’ll start the real work.

Implementation and Launch

After we’re done with the design phase in Photoshop we move to the xHTML/CSS of those mockups. In this phase we usually ask for no input from the client. xHTML/CSS is a pretty straight-forward thing, clients usually put a lot of trust in our capabilities here, so there is no need really to go into explaining the semantics or validity of the said documents and whatnot.

We do our thing, and (if needed) when we implement it into a CMS we just ask them to run through it, see if they are satisfied and if they are, they are provided with online training to reference at any time they need help. Usually they do that while the site is still on our development server, once they are done we move the site to their own server, we check if everything is working as it should and that’s it, job done.

Our design director loves to dream in RGB, and polishing every last detail using pixels and POSH to solve your business needs. Drafting beautiful, elegant websites that convey both your message and your personality to the online world is a challenge that we thrive on. We enjoy increasing your visibility and that is why we try to cover every last detail. True, sometimes it takes a little longer to do things our way, but the results are always worth it.