Social Media Marketing

If you want to be relevant online, you must have a twitter account and facebook fan page. End of discussion. Everything else is debatable and can lead to overwhelm and underconvert. We can help you set up your social media outlets and gently pull in your audience rather than pushing out messages to followers that don't want to hear from you.

Supporting IE (written in July, 2008)

To me, supporting IE (and IE6 specifically) is comparable to selling a product in China (assuming you live in the USA). The market is huge and enticing, but it can be more costly when all is said and done.

Some people say that you absolutely must support IE because an overwhelming number of people still use it. It is true that close to 85% of all US websurfers use one version of IE. The important questions though, how many people have ACCESS TO FIREFOX OR A MAC, what is the likelihood or expense of getting them to convert (to FIREFOX or another browser or a MAC) and what is the expense associated with artificially supporting an inferior browser.

1. Access to IE.
Everyone has access to FIREFOX other than people whose computer comes loaded with IE are not allowed to download anything because of a system admin. Basically, people on company computers, that are not MACS, and are not allowed to download ANYTHING.

2. Converting
Downloading FIREFOX takes about 2 minutes and is free. There is Chrome and Safari too. All free. All easy. Enough said.

3. Cost...
What is the cost of supporting an inferior browser like IE6 and IE in general. Is it really worth it at the end of the day-

The cost of supporting IE can be higher than you might think. There are direct costs involved with bug checking, testing pages etc. There are costs associated with the fact that the site just looks better in other browsers. Then the costs are increased considering FF will pay you (as of last year, not sure if they do anymore) to convert users.

So while conventional wisdom says that it is a no brainer to spend the extra money to get your product in the hands of a huge market, it might not be as black and white as it seems. Just like with any subsidy, webmasters who pay for the development of IE6 compatible sites are adding costs and removing efficiency from a market. Does Microsoft really need to be subsidized?


For the reasons listed above we support the project "iE6 no more" and, frankly, wish we had initiated it ourselves:)

OUTSOURCING

Outsourcing is perhaps more of a "topic" than something that we provide, but it's an important issue so we are including it here.

We do not have any black and white dogmas about outsourcing. We have a team of people who are great at what they do, some of them live in the USA, others are spread around the world. If your project requires a faster turnaround time or if we need extra help, we make independent decisions about bringing on extra people. Sometimes, things cost less because of lower quality, other times things cost less because of lower overhead. Our general rule is that it does not matter how low the HOURLY rate is, the issue is the TOTAL cost, convenience, communication, and code quality.

Hosting

We can help you with everything from buying your domain name, to setting the nameservers, to getting the site to resolve, to shared hosting, to dedicated servers. We can recommend some hosting providers and help you set it up, or you can host your site with us. For big projects, we will host your site for free for 1 year!

We can also help you out with Google Apps, and Google Adsense.

SEO (search engine optimization)

Beware! There are many (not all) in the SEO business who are crocks. You can end up paying way too much for something you could have learned how to do with 2 hours research on Google. We will provide you with basic meta tags, and content for free, and even more importantly, we will teach you (easily) how to optimize the pages yourself. You will be surprised that it is relatively easy and fun to see results. Much of SEO is determined by links from other sites to your site, and relevant content on your site, plus proper code and page structure, etc.

Remember, we are helping you build a prototype here, if you DO WANT TO SPEND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ON SEO, there are people out there who can do a better job than we can, but if you are ok with someone doing a basic, good job for free; that's us.

Design

Design is how your page looks and how it "flows". We have found that good programmers are not necessarily good designers and vice versa. We will have experts in each area, do what they do best so that the finished product works well and looks great. We can do simple, we can do glossy Web 2.0, we can make it flashy... whatever you want.

Programming.

Programming is how your page works. It is the functionality. We will write clean code that is compliant with all industry wide standards. We will make sure your site looks good in all popular browsers including IE, FIREFOX, SAFARI and others. We work mostly with PHP, MYSQL, AJAX, JAVASCRIPT, etc. but we can accomodate anything you request.