How large is the company of E. Curtis Designs? E. Curtis Designs is a sole proprietorship that works in partnership with Conti-Creative Designs. Edmund Price is the licensed owner and primary designer, though other design professionals are used on a case by case basis if warranted. Edmund Price has been designing websites professionally since 2001.
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 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 copy/technical writing?
Edmund Price has many years of experience writing for diverse business platforms - print journalism, hospitality training and development, and business applications within the design community. This experience includes web applications, business proposals, employee manuals, reference lists/ tests, training agendas, and many years of diverse academic study and academic tutoring of collegiate students in English.
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 product at an affordable price this 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 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/directories without additional cost. We also offer an optimization service where for an additional cost we will extend our submissions to the internet yellow pages, and optimize your pages for SEO ranking. Our optimization service 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.
After the site is completed what do you charge to maintain a site?
We will maintain most sites for a cost of $35/hr with a two hour minimum charge, though this minimum is waived if frequent updates are provided and billed to the quarter-hour, and the client is invoice when approximately $200 is reached.
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.
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.
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 other OpenSource platforms which include PHP Nuke, Drupal, Gallery2, Magento, and Lore.
Do you do E-Commerce?
There are a variety of E-Commerce options and we have a working familiarity with some of the major ones. Currently we provide e-commerce with the Joomla CMS (VirtueMart) and through Paypal as buttons and shopping cart. We are currently learning Magento, and ideally we will be using it for e-commerce in the near 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 or Java?
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 the plugin, so this is rarely a problem anymore, though 64bit PC operating systems can't view the recent version of flash with the IE browser (will likely be resolved soon), and earlier versions of Java are often not viewable on newer systems. 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 rarely is a problem for flash header designs, but an entire website created in flash may not be effective in file size. And maybe most importantly, Flash and Java can't be indexed by the search engines anymore than the content of a movie can be indexed. For this reason we don't recommend entire website's to be designed in flash, or flash only navigation. As for Java, there are some nice animations available, but in most cases Flash is the best choice for animation since it can be designed to be interactive..