Web-design Firm Offers Help to Small Companies

Jul 23, 2008 – By Marian Bond • business@rgj.com
RGJ Business Section: July 22, 2008

After being a Web design developer for a local company, Kristy Crabtree decided to open her own company. Westward Strategy & Design Group was established to offer professional services to the small companies that might not want to invest large sums of money to get onto the Internet to promote their services or products.

“I had worked my way up in 13 years with my employer, from an apprentice to director of professional services, and I was managing 12 to 15 technical and creative designers,” Crabtree said. “I wanted my company to be more of a boutique agency. More intimate with the customers. Because I have low overhead, I have more time to spend with my clients. I wanted to target a different audience.”

Crabtree started her company from a home office two years ago. She now shares a 2,200-square-foot building in Sparks with ACS Business Insurance Services.

“The technical people do the heavy program duties, set up shopping carts. Things like that,” Crabtree said.

Her customers range from sole proprietors to companies with 15 to 20 employees. “I don’t go after the larger clients. There is a place for them. I did not believe anybody was facilitating the niche market I want,” she said.

Crabtree says that a new customer coming to her needs to understand who his or her audience is. Clients also need to have goals and objectives they want to sell or the service or product they are offering. She stressed that so much is happening on the Web these days that anyone in business needs to have a presence or they will miss out on clients.

Another plus to having a Web site, according to Crabtree, is that analytical reports can be produced to show activity on the site. This type of tracking helps with marketing goals. Her company will produce monthly or quarterly reports as required.

“The typical site will have a home page that tells about the company or information about the team that works with the product or services,” Crabtree said. She also likes to set up a news page that tells more about the company. The Web site will be set up to provide fresh information.

She also advises each company to have its own domain name and to maintain ownership.

Clients interested in art or photography can get stock photos on Web sites. “They are very reasonable in price. If you search long enough online, as we do, you know which photos have not been used,”

In planning for a Web site, the company has to decide if it wants to reach a local area or a global audience.

Crabtree said she often has companies with existing sites come for a redesign.

“We first ask if they have any analytical tools to get information as to how a Web site is performing. We find out if anybody has been going to the site. We like to sit back for about a month so we can get information. We will create basically how I would plan to help fix (the site). We don’t want their money to go down the drain. We’re a small business, too. We understand money is important to everybody.”

Crabtree said she is always eager to accommodate the customer’s needs. Her company can set up a Web site in just a short time, but generally takes about two months to finish a detailed product.

The cost of a Web site with Westward Strategy & Design Group runs as low as $500, but depending upon the content and intricacy can also run $10,000 or more.

Doug Kurkul, CEO of the Reno Sparks Chamber of Commerce, said that last January he entrusted Crabtree’s company to redesign the chamber web site www.renosparkschamber.org and he said he was quite satisfied with the results.

“I’ve dealt with Web designers for 13 years now,” Kurkul said. “I believe that Westward Strategy & Design is one of the best I’ve ever dealt with. They are easy to work with and they have outstanding skills on both technical and on artistic aspects of web design.”

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Westward Strategy & Design Group, LLC.
www.westwardstrategy.com
Phone: (775) 626-8330

Testimonials are and should be considered true marketing if they are written honestly, with real facts and the ability for new business to contact your references direct if needed. They provide the much-needed ‘proof’ for waivering prospects and can be used to convert more easily if given the ability and access.

It’s easy to sell myself and make the promise that I have your businesses best interest in the forefront of my mind but it can be an up hill battle to sing my own praises when I have competitors that might brow beat me simply by price.

Inorder to be able to compete in such a saturated and competitive marketplace here are four tips for how I make honest and competitive use of testimonials:

1) Westward doesn’t over-edit. Our testimonials work best when they are in real people language. The real written language helps our readers connect which demonstrates that we are an honest company looking out for our clients each and every day.

2) Westward uses testimonials that fit. We place appropriate testimonials along with a particular point that we are trying to make and back it up with facts. Call us on it if you want. We’d be happy to deliver the information.

3) Westward never fakes it. While testimonials are crucial, we don’t take the risk to fake them. We figured that most people have well-trained ‘this is a crock’ detector and they can smell a fake a mile away. If you would like a list of our references – contact me direct: info@westwardstrategy.com.

4) Westward always encourages specifics. Whether a client gives us a testimonial on their own or whether we ask them for one, we do ask our clients to be specific on how Westward helped them. Wouldn’t you want to know exactly what we did as far as specifics for the client rather than a bland – yeah Westward Strategy was great cause they just were!

Read ‘real‘ accounts of how Westward Strategy has been an asset to clients by visiting the testimonials page, my Linked in page or any of my local associations: Better Business Bureau, eWomen Network, Sparks Chamber of Commerce or the Reno Sparks Chamber of Commerce.

I have long admired Opera for their educational aspect and their desire to advance the skill level of web workers everywhere. Looking over the outline of the documents it appears this is almost identical to the way I was educated at the University of Idaho and, as Sophia states in her article, it is extremely difficult to find a program like that – that is independent of computer science or graphic design. However, if the web is going to reach the longevity and revered status of print we need more educational institutions to begin teaching and sculpting artisans of this “new media” without the limitations of established programs, but also on top of or ahead of modern practices.

I can’t wait for the rest of the articles to come out!

1. Deactivate the plugin. Login to your WordPress administration and go to the Plugins section. Click the ‘deactivate’ link to the right of the plugin description.
2. Visit the plugin author’s website. Read through their documentation and/or the plugin readme file for instructions on removing the plugin.
3. Delete the plugin. Access your website files using your FTP client. Go to wp-content/plugins and delete the plugin files and/or directory.
4. Remove any associated files. Follow the author’s instructions for removing any associated files or folders. Some plugins will modify WordPress files including wp-config.php and/or your htaccess file. Look for lines of code in those files related to the plugin you are removing. Delete those lines and then upload the new files to your server.

You may be wondering why I am posting this. Well, if you have been to our site within the last few weeks you may have noticed some performance issues, including but not limited to; very slow load times, pages that fail to load and instead load a blank page, and a sporadic internal server error. After a couple of conference calls with our host to get it straightened out, we determined it was a plugin conflict between two different cache plugins.

Cache plugins can be great because they create and then serve static versions of all your pages. So if you have a sudden influx of visitors from an article that has been Dugg you can still serve the page without all the database calls and possibly crashing your server altogether. However, as we experienced they can also be troublesome to correct when they conflict.

So we would like to apologize for the poor website performance and invite you to leave us a note if you continue to experience problems on our site. Thank you.

Congratulations to IWC and thanks to unmatched style!

35 Professional Looking Corporate Websites

And, yes I stole my post title from Tracy Beach’s comment on the original post.

About Nevada Insurance Agency Company

In the past 72 years, Nevada Insurance Agency Company has grown into one of the state’s leading Insurance Agencies. We have never prided ourselves on numbers. Instead, we pride ourselves on client satisfaction.

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