Following are the frequently asked questions and items of interest to our visitors; if we have failed to adequately address anything in this section or on our website that you would like to know more about please feel free to contact us. Many of our clients are initially unclear on how to get started, so we encourage them to view our Click (+) to Expand
How large is the company of E. Curtis Designs? E. Curtis Designs is a sole proprietorship owned and operated by Edmund Price. Other design professionals may be employed to assist with a portion of a project upon a case by case basis, though all work is overseen by the owner, and all projects are completed inhouse.
What is your design experience? Edmund Price, and other designers I work with, have advanced academic courses and training in website design, graphic design, and web scripting languages. To design the pages I primarily use Adobe Dreamweaver yet will use other design generators and free coding to compliment the development as necessary. To enhance the design process I use Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Fireworks, Acrobat Professional, and a variety of other essential design programs and applications for creating diverse effect such as flash slideshows, CSS navigations, Forums, Blogs, Calendars, Polls, and most anything else you've seen on the web.
What is your experience with editing and copy writing? Edmund Price has many years of technical experience writing for diverse businesses and institutions; this experience includes training and writing in the field of print journalism, hospitality training and management relations (employee manuals, reference lists/tests, training agendas), business proposals in the design industry, and a degree in Liberal Arts which included tutoring college students on the proper use of English and how to organize thoughts and convey words effectively. In addition, Edmund has been building websites for over 10 years which has provided a clear sense of what is necessary in regard to page text content.
How can you afford to charge so little? Since E. Curtis Designs is a small company we don't have a lot of overhead expense and we do our own internet marketing; and we believe that by providing a great service at an affordable price will result in future design projects and referrals from our clients.
What is your "100% Satisfaction Guarantee"? If you don't like the initial home page design or other work we have fashioned you owe us nothing for this stage of site development, yet we reserve the right to use the site as a portfolio sample.
How can you charge only $50 a year to host my website? We have spent a lot of the time surfing to find the best providers at the lowest price. Once we found a company which provided a fast and secure hosting platform we developed a partnership with them so we could pass on this savings. We provide our hosting clients managed assistance of their hosting accounts as needed, and will contact the hosting company on your behalf if additional services are needed or problems arise.
Do you guarantee a high ranking in the search engines? No, we can't guarantee a high ranking and those who say they can are misleading you. For the sites we design we will submit the completed site to the top free search engines without additional cost, which will typically get your site ranked in the top 10 of relevant key word queries, which isn't bad considering that there are millions of websites.
Do you provide website marketing services? Yes we do. We recognize that many of our clients need more than just having their website submitted to the search engines, especially when they are a new company and/or there is fiece competition in their market. For a low cost we will submit your website to the top search engines, directories, internet yellowpages, and assist you with developing a social media presence. We also offer an optimization service for websites designed by other designers where we will optimize all your pages for SEO ranking and provide suggestions for improvement as needed.
After the site is completed what do you charge to maintain a site? We maintain websites per our hourly rate of $35/hr with a two-hour minimum charge for infrequent changes (minimum is waived if 1 or more edits are requested per year). Updates are billed to the quarter-hour, and the client is invoiced when $200 is reached (or 3 months if the invoice amount is less than $200).
What happens if you build me a site and I realize after I pay that I am not happy with it? Upon site completion we provide low cost site updates, and in some cases will make site changes without additional cost. Our primary goal is that our clients are fully satisfied, and we will make every effort to ensure this.
Do you build sites for a business outside of your geographical area? Yes, we will build a site for you no matter where you live, though any shipping expense of site materials will be the client's responsibility, and we do require a deposit upfront for developments outside of our geographical area.
Do you build (CMS) Content Management Systems? Yes, we build CMS websites utilizing the Joomla CMS and Wordpress platforms primarily, though we have worked with a variety of other OpenSource platforms and will work with these platforms as needed.
Do you do E-Commerce?Currently we develop with PayPal using their button and shopping cart functionality, with VirtueMart when utilizing the Joomla CMS, and OSCommerce. We have a general working knowledge of ZenCart, CSCart, and Magento though our experience is still relatively limited with these cart options. Ideally we will be offering full Cart application development in the future.
Are the scripts you use cross-browser compatible? The scripts we use in our designs are current with the latest design standards, and as such are compatible with FF1+ IE6+ Opr7+. This means that they are compatible with Mozilla Firefox version 1 and above, Internet Explorer 6 and above, and Opera version 7 and above. Most people do have current browsers (all new computers will have recent browser versions), so compatibility is rarely a problem with these scripts.
Are there problems with using Flash, Java, or jQuery? Flash and Java are great design resources for providing animation on a website, but the site visitor does need to have the flash or Java plugin to view the content. Most people will have these, so this is rarely a problem anymore. There is also the potential problem of a large animation loading so slowly that the visitor decides to leave your site instead of waiting for it; this is rarely a problem for flash header designs, but an entire website created in flash may not be effective in file size (especially on a shared wireless connection or a mobile device). And maybe most importantly, Flash and Java can't be indexed by the search engines anymore than the contents of a movie can. For this reason we don't recommend entire website's to be designed in flash, or flash only navigation. As for Java, it is still used for games and the ocassional image effect (reflected image with rippling-water and the spinning cube are popular ones), but it is not nearly as popular as it once was so generally not used. That being said, our preference for animation is jQuery. jQuery provides some great animation effects, and is especially effective for navigation systems and header designs, and since it is SEO compatible it is the best choice overall.
