What we talk about in the initial consultation

If you are interested in our branding or website design services, please contact us and give us a bit of background information about your project. After we review the preliminary details, we will ask you to schedule a 30 minute phone call with us where we can answer any questions that you have about working together. Many clients come to us without much knowledge or ever having worked with a designer or developer before, and we are happy to walk you through the process and to show different examples and offer options. We also like to ask questions during the consultation, and the conversation covers 3 main categories:

1. Strategy and branding: what you’d like the overall look and style to be, type of business, target audience, competitors, website, social media, printed materials, and maybe color scheme and preferred font styles. Sometimes an illustration is needed, or many times the design will be based on a photograph (either a stock photo or a customized photo shoot.) If a logo design is needed, we can discuss those details, as well as other specific design requests.

2. Website content: if website design and development is needed, we go over what pages will be part of the website, and what would be on each page. Special pages or sections needed, such as blogs, or mailing list forms, or image slideshows or galleries. The total number of pages and content on them is factored into the time it will take to build the website.

3.  Technical info: products such as domain name, website hosting, SSL certificates, etc. If you’re already with another company, we’ll ask for your account info and we’ll look into how those things are configured and plan to stay with things as they are, or perhaps offer another solution if we think that it would work out better for you. Clients who have never had a site before usually are starting fresh.

After we collect all of this info, we’ll write up an accurate estimate for your project and send it along with a simple contract. We’ll factor in your deadline as well as the branding concept and/or size of the website and let you make your decision from there.

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