Archive for the ‘small business’ Category

When Things Make You Feel Old.

icon.pngI’d like to think that I’m ‘with it’. I’m on the Face­book and the Twit­ter, and am fairly active in both – I ‘get’ ’social media’, that’s what I’m saying. How­ever, with that said, I really think I finally feel like an old codger that just doesn’t under­stand the crazy kids and their new­fan­gled internets.

What has caused this epic change? Simply put, a new iPhone app called Birdhouse.

Now don’t get all ahead of your­selves here – it looks like a beau­ti­fully done app, and the web­site design, intro video and every­thing in between look to be fan­tas­ti­cally done. I don’t want to take that away from the folks who put this together (doesn’t hurt that Sand­wich Dynam­ics is an amaz­ing com­pany name, either).

The app simply exists to let you quickly enter in ‘tweet’ ideas, slowly refine them, rate them accord­ingly, then finally pub­lish the great ones, while still refin­ing the rest.

It’s just that I feel like they’re solv­ing a prob­lem that didn’t really exist until they showed up with the app. Again, maybe I’m an old­ster now and I just don’t ‘get’ it. Maybe true genius is doing exactly what I feel they did — cre­at­ing a solu­tion to an imag­i­nary prob­lem. I may or may not end up giving it a shot, as maybe I really am miss­ing out on some­thing. I just can’t shake that feel­ing that it makes no sense to me. Regard­less of how I feel, you should check it out for your­self — the intro video is quite good.

Anyway, stay off my lawn.

Small Studios and How They Can Help You

When approached by a prospec­tive client, a lot of the time the ques­tion is floated to me in one way or another, “why should I use a small studio?”, and I think the answer is quite clear. Smaller stu­dios not only save you money, but they give you the atten­tion and flex­i­bil­ity that folks need and deserve. In the end, the client is hap­pier because of this unique sit­u­a­tion, and we ben­e­fit from per­son­ally making sure each of our clients leave com­pletely satisfied.

Examining Costs

On aver­age, a (small to medium-​sized) web site designed, built, tested and deliv­ered should take some­where between 20 and 40 hours. This of course can vary wildly, but this is a pretty good esti­mate for most small to medium sized busi­nesses. I’m sure a rush job could be accom­plished in roughly half this time, but it’d be akin to taking your car to the mechanic and asking them to do the bare min­i­mum amount of work, and hurry up with it! You may be able to drive out of the shop, but God knows how long you’d last before the engine needs more work on it. In the end, you would pay much more to have the same amount of repairs done.

We charge a rate roughly 1/3 what a large design studio does, mainly because we lack the over­head that those places do. Because of that, not only are your costs lim­ited, but the atten­tion of the firm is squarely on you and your needs. If a project becomes larger in scope than orig­i­nally antic­i­pated, we can always hire extra folks to come in and help out (as we have exten­sive con­nec­tions to design­ers in the Atlanta and South­east­ern region in gen­eral), but you don’t have to assume that over­head regard­less of your needs.

Personal Touch

All to often, when you do busi­ness with a design firm, you first speak to some­one in sales. Once you show your­self to be a poten­tial client, a project man­ager or designer will come to the meet­ing to talk about the par­tic­u­lars of what your project entails. You will then usu­ally talk to a few design­ers, cre­ative direc­tors, or other project man­agers by the time it’s all said and done. How do you know if what you spoke to one person about was prop­erly relayed to another? Work­ing with a smaller com­pany ensures that, from start to finish, you are deal­ing with at most one or two folks. When you limit the number of times you have to repeat your­self, the less time we all spend on get­ting your needs taken care of.

It all just makes sense

If you’re look­ing to get a small-to-medium sized project taken of, don’t want to pay an extreme over­head just to do busi­ness with a design firm, and want the per­sonal atten­tion a small busi­ness can offer, then we hope that you keep Square­One Web Design in mind when you con­sider your next web design or redesign.

Spotlight Sound Studio Site Refresh

I just wanted to take a moment to update every­one on what we’ve been up to. We made some exten­sive changes to the Spot­light Sound Studio web­site, mainly to the con­tent man­age­ment system, but we also per­formed exten­sive search engine opti­miza­tion for the studio. After talk­ing with Jason at Spot­light, we agreed that they should focus more on spe­cific types of clients & spe­cific key­words when talk­ing about their ser­vices. The goal is to attract more pop-​punk and indie rock bands to his Alpharetta based record­ing studio.

What we were respon­si­ble for was tight­en­ing up some of the con­tent man­age­ment for Jason, so that the site was easier for him to update. Also, we intro­duced a blog so that he can talk about the goings on at his studio. Addi­tion­ally, we upgraded his site to include a robust photo gallery so that they will be able to show­case some of the artists that come through the doors at Spotlight.

This site was ini­tially designed by Square­One a few years ago, but we are proud to unveil the updated ver­sion and to be a part of Jason’s grow­ing business.