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About us
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
When we started in the web design business, back in 2002, we were one of the very first young Argentinian companies that realized that, due to the recent devaluation of our currency, the Peso, it was a good idea to sell our services to the rest of the world, specially to countries like USA and to Europe.
The business seemed easy, in that time one could live well with a monthly income of 2000 pesos (666 US dollars, in that time). I even remember a small meeting I had with someone who wanted to associate with me whose goal was to earn 1000 pesos per month! So, in 2002 you could sell your services very cheap to USA and earn a good amount of pesos.
But these young companies were not all very good. Most were very inexperienced and the quality of the service was usually bad. I used to work for one of these companies and it was basically a project hunter. They used to collect as much projects as possible, we, as programmers and designers, often found ourselves with 4 or 5 or more projects at once. And you can’t give a good service like that. Today that company is dead, and so are many more.
These is because the situation in our country changed and also changed the way other countries see us. The inflation in our country moved many of our costs up. When you could live with 2000 pesos in 2002, now you need 5000 to 6000 pesos in 2009. So it is not that good business as it was in the past for companies that decide to go offshore with Argentina. On the other hand, clients are now more experienced in looking for an offshore country. Back in the beginning of this century, an American company may have thought that an Argentinian companies had more or less a minimum of principles, sense of responsibility, service quality and respect for the clients as the rest of their vendors. Well, it is sad to say that, specially me being Argentinian, but it is not often like that. So clients now are more warned about this and they look up better for an offshore vendor.
You have to be careful of the project hunters. Those who spam and try to do as much websites as possible. It is impossible to get a good service like that. Today, you can find cheap web design shops that will do your website (maybe template-based) for 150 US dollars or less.
Then, how we are different?
We take every project seriously. Every project is unique and so should be the design and treatment. A style-sheet doesn’t fit for all, a CMS module does not work the same in every site, so we take the necessary time to analyze every detail of every project.
Your project is Unique
We believe that a website or application is only successful when users actually use it. If they don’t find it easy and exciting we believe it’s a failure. Users are usually the visitors of a website, the administrators of a CMS and the client’s employees using a sales application. We work very close with end users. We interview them, we profile them and we work for them. We could say that our work is user-centered.
UI Usability care
We also take the needed time to design user interfaces. We don’t work with User Interface (UI) frameworks, UI generators or templates because usability is totally absent there. We usually don’t do every web form of a web application the same style. We think about every page and we give it the best design it could work, based on what we know from the users and our own usability analysis and test. User Interface Usability is very important for us.
Fit to be used
Another feature we care a lot is to deliver our work as “fit to be used” as possible. This simply means that we want to make life as simple as possible for the people who will be using our work. They may be administrator deploying the website we did or users installing a software system. If they have to follow one thousand steps to configure something, install different drivers according to their operating system, install and configure a database engine or more, ALL before they install our stuff, then we are not happy. We try to simplify as much as possible the installation, configuration and early usage of our sites and applications. That’s what we call Fit to be used.
Maintenance slot
Finally, we know that no web or desktop project is perfect. There always will be changes and we are always prepared for that. One of the worst errors in project management of any area is to assume that there’s no more work when the project is finished and delivered to the client. Wrong! Almost every finished project will need maintenance. A building, a road, a website, a program. We consider a prudential maintenance slot for every project, so we are always ready to respond in case of need. Failure to respond rapidly when a client asks a change in a finished project is seen as a bad sign for our reputation. We don’t want to be seen as project hunters who simply disappear when we get paid.
But what about common websites?
It is true that some special kinds of sites, like shopping-carts, product catalogues, blogs and social network sites work more or less the same way. That means that they all could share the same base code while we just focus in the unique design, user centered, UI analysis of the frontend.
What we are working on at this time is in common framework that should work for common sites like the ones we mentioned above, that will probably help us offer our better services for less.
We think that’s the next way of doing things. It doesn’t have any sense to charge for analysis, design and implementation of a complete e-commerce or blog site when they are all the same and they all share the same code.
In a next article we’ll be describing better this new project. Keep reading us!
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