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Patrick Bowen's Corporate Blog

BES (Holland Job) Finally Done! 7-23-07

Wow. I'm finally done with the Balanced Enterprise Solutions (BES) job. I started in...February? Maybe? It was a loong time ago in any case. Things finally slowed down for them, the planets aligned, and now the site is done! The address is www.bes-llc.com.

Revised Quote System 7-23-07

After doing work with Masana Design (www.masana.com), I realized that my pricing is way off. I should be charging much more than I am, even for small businesses. I still have Masana beat as far as pricing for a custom website, but my prices are a little higher now.

Also, any future print work that I do will have to be a little more expensive than it is now. If I were a professional print designer, I would be starving right now.

Anyway, these are considerations for the future, and not so much an urgent issue.

New Quote System 6-25-07

After looking at other designer's websites, I came to the conclusion that they are inadequate when a customer wants a quote. To be honest, I don't really care to contact a representative from the company to get a simple quote. Especially if I'm shopping around.

Because of this, I came up with a price structure, and I made a PHP-based form that gives you a genuinely no-obligation quote on the spot. Of course, the results are forwarded to me so that a) I can see who's getting quotes, and b) if ESPN wants their site redesigned, it's going to be more than the $825 ceiling.

That's the other thing...the "official price range" is now $200 (3-4 pg website, no frills) to $825 (21+ page monster and everything else). I hope that this new system gets some hits...otherwise, what good is it?

Holland Web Jobs- 6-19-07

In case you didn't know, the first two jobs I took were leads from a buddy of mine...Jason Mulder. I met Jason about a year ago in Wisconsin at the World Affairs Seminar (WAS). I acted like a big enough geek in front of him that he decided to hook me up with some web design jobs.
The first was the Holland Transplanter job. I took that in February, and I am still working on getting some updates from the old webmaster...hang tight! That project should be laid to rest soon.

The second was the Balanced Enterprise Solutions (BES) job. That company is actually co-managed by Jason's father, Don Mulder. He was kind enough to give me this job even though I had very little to show in the way of a portfolio. The website isn't really much, just a table-style assembly of some vector graphics. It looks alright, but the important thing is that it is much more functional than their old website.

I'll probably be making a trip down to Holland here in the near future (week or two, maybe?) to wrap up these loose ends. We'll see.

We Are Online! - 6-19-07