The interwebs are where it's at!
Functional websites don’t have to be ugly. And you shouldn’t be intimidated by your web vendor.
A web development project with Imp Designs starts with a brief questionnaire and an interview. We try to develop a general site outline and present that with our proposal so you know exactly what we’re going to build for the price we’re proposing. Once we agree on the work to be done and the price, we have you sign our contract (blame the bad eggs we’ve come across for that!), ask for a 20% deposit and we get to work.
Depending on the scope and complexity of the project, we’ll either have a go at the design or draw up a few wire frame sketches to make sure all the features you want will work together in an intuitive way. We use an online project management too, Basecamp, to manage the communication between our team and yours. With your Basecamp account, you’ll be able to view our to-do lists and monitor our progress, view comps of your site design, upload files, collaborate with fine tuning your site outline and send messages to our team.
We prefer to host the sites we build on one of our dedicated servers. We use Liquid Web as our hosting company because their team of level 3 technicians are available by phone 24/7/365. Our insistence on hosting sites we develop comes from a desire to develop your site in the quickest, most secure and efficient manner possible and we can do that better if we know exactly what that host machine has installed and how it’s configured.
Most of our sites these days utilize an amazing bit of software called Expression Engine. After experimenting with a wide variety of content management systems, we settled on Expression Engine due to its ease of use and customizable nature. We’re proud to say we’re a member of the Expression Engine Professional Network.
We believe in web standards, so all of our sites are hand coded to the exacting standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium. We test for compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 & 7 for Windows, FIrefox 2 & 3 for Windows and OSX, and Safari for Windows and OSX. We use versioning software to maintain the integrity of your site’s code base and to facilitate the collaborative efforts of our development team.
And that’s the techie stuff… in the end, it’s our goal to produce a web site that produces for you. We install Google Analytics on every site we build and give you access to the reports so that we can watch your site’s performance over time. After all, you can’t control that which you cannot measure. All techie-ness aside, we want the site to look good. We’re still a bit artsy and feel that the days of butt-ugly clunky websites are behind us. Give us a call or shoot us an email; let us rev up your site!
