Great question! We start by providing all new clients with a free no-obligation consultation. At this meeting you can expect a comfortable, informational conversation with your project manager. The purpose of this meeting is to provide you with an understanding of our services and the specific options available to you. If you are ready to continue with services after our consultation, we will guide you through the process and establish the terms of the project – though we do encourage all clients to compare us to the competition before ordering any services with us.
Our goal at this stage of the project is to treat you with respect throughout the consultation, provide you with a fair analysis of services, and give you the time and space needed to decide on what method is best for you.
Services vary with the scope of the project, but popular selections include domain registration, business email, web hosting, site design/development and ecommerce functionality. Providing these services in a high quality capacity is not just a “line” we use – it is at the core of our business model. For example, when building your website, we do not stop until you are absolutely satisfied with the end-result. This is accomplished by keeping you involved with your site’s development throughout the project and paying careful attention to your feedback. In addition, once your site is “live”, it will be served to your visitors from high quality and very fast servers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Occasionally, annual services like web hosting and domain registration may change depending on market conditions – if this were to ever occur, you would be given ample notification to decide if you would like to continue using our services at the new rate structure. We include this information to stay open with you about the possibilities of unforeseen fee changes — HOWEVER…to date, we have NEVER increased annual fees. In fact, some have actually decreased over the years.
Many times we have seen other design firms and hosting companies register domain names “for clients”, but actually register it in their own company’s name. When the client decided to change hosts, or transfer the domain to our services, it would be “held hostage” with no legal obligations since it was actually owned by the service providing company.
We have also seen other website services include in their fine-print a requirement that customers must continue to pay monthly in order for their website to remain active, in addition to not giving them access to the website files if they choose to do business elsewhere. To clarify, this is a common practice for do-it-yourself online site builders (including in some of the options we offer), but when paying up-front for website design and development, in our opinion, these files should be provided to the customer in the event they elect to move their website to a different service provider.
You DO NOT have to worry about these problems with us! When purchasing design and web development services, we provide you with the initial back-up copy of your website, and your domain name is ALWAYS registered in your name!