A few days ago, Apple has reported it’s Highest Quarterly and Earnings Ever. But more impressing than the actual numbers, is how they achieved this.

I just stumbled upon a video interview with Steve Balmer from a few years back, actually laughing at Apple’s iPhone, which he considered an overpriced device, saying nobody will pay $500 for a phone while there are alternatives at $99. He couldn’t have been proven more wrong. Until that point, the standard for phones was that they had to have a qwerty keyboard and a pen for the touchscreen, but Apple were bold and visionary and went against the stream. Today, most of the smartphones have multi-touch screens, no pens and no keyboards. The same happened with the iPad, where everybody up to that point thought that tablets had no future and that the only way to build a tablet was for it to be a notebook with a rotating screen and a standard desktop operating system. Today, tablets are very popular and all of them are light, have multi-touch screens, no keyboards and a custom operating system.

The best thing however, about Apple’s success is that it strongly proves that there is a huge market of people willing to pay extra in order to get a quality product. iPhone, iPod and iPad are the leaders in their sectors, despite being more expensive than their competitors and the Mac is gaining more and more market share with every year.

What we all can learn from this with the products and services we offer, is to follow our vision, don’t compromise and don’t be afraid to be more expensive than the competition. This is the only way to truly innovate.

After 2010′s launch of iVox.ro, in 2011 we’ve launched CashControl.ro which has been greatly received by users. In 2012, we’re planing to add at least another product to our suite as well as launch the existing ones on new markets. It will definitely be an interesting year.

We wish everyone a great 2012!

What is TeCOMM

TeCOMM eCommerce 100% is a two day conference held at Best Western Fusion Hotel in Cluj-Napoca, in October, and here’s why it will definitely rock: First of all, there will be many attendants with a lot of experience in eCommerce business, strategies and marketing. The core idea of the event is in fact finding solid solutions to eCommerce business problems and the fun part is tons of valuable social time for business owners to interact and share experience.

Update coming, stay close!

Fixed Price Billing

This is the method the first time clients incline towards, especially the ones with little experience in buying agency services (web, print or classic advertising).

The pros for a client:

• the budget is fixed, you know what your bottom line will be
• you know what you will be getting in the end, however the initial idea might be incomplete in which case changes on the scope would be required

The cons for a client:

• a full comprehensive specification needs to be in place from the start
• a fixed price means a frozen specification, so you can’t change your mind about any feature
• the features are built according to the specification, but creative ideas for improvements are limited to the proposed scope and budget

The truth is that requirements and specifications vary during the project, whether there are new ideas or that previously considered good ideas don’t seem so good anymore, and this is especially true for the web. On our side, on a project that has a fixed price, we simply can’t accept any changes that affect the scope of the project as it has a direct impact on the price, so any change request requires a new estimate and update of the payment terms.

Hourly Billing

This method is preferred by clients with experience in working with agencies, or who already worked with the agency in question.

The pros for a client:

• you pay for exactly how much is worked, nothing more, nothing less
• changes and requests are simple and don’t require any formalities
• client has total control of the budget and through simplifying features or completely postponing them for a future phases, the bottom line can be considerably lowered

The cons for a client:

• the budget is not guaranteed: although an estimate is provided from the start and for each task/change, the final bottom line is not certain
• often this is regarded as handing the agency a blank check, however in reality the exposure is even more limited than in the case of fixed based projects as with hourly projects there is no down payment and as soon as the agency doesn’t perform as expected, the contract can be cancelled while the balance is low

The main advantage of this method is that changes to the scope of work are easy and quick and adding or changing features can be done instantly.

What we prefer?

We obviously prefer the hourly based method, because it’s fair and produces the best results.

No estimation is perfect, and for fixed price billing it either takes more hours than estimated (in which case the agency looses money) or it takes less time than estimated (in which case the client is overcharged), so in either case one of the parties overpays or is underpaid.

Building most web projects is a complex process, and ideas that looked good in plan often don’t look good in practice, new requirements are discovered and things previously considered simple prove to be complex, so changes are a natural thing. The best projects we’ve built had many changes to scope during the development, some of them adding extra cost, some of them cutting the development time, but all of them producing a better end result.

Today, most of our projects are hourly based, and absolutely all of our returning client opt for the hourly billing even if their previous project was a fixed price one. So our conclusion is that clients prefer to work hourly as they value the flexibility, but when starting working on the first web project, or when working with an agency for the first time, they feel safer with a fixed price.

You’re now familiar with our current website, but you might not be with its predecesor, the website we had from 2008 up until July 2011. This is the story of the redesign process: what we kept, what we changed and what we added, and most importantly, the reason behind each decision.

As an agency site, it was clear that this needed to showcase our skills and our taste in design, so we really needed to do our best work. With the general design, we wanted to switch from the darker toned colors to whites and grays in order to emphasize on the cleanness and usability of the website.

Beside the obvious need to update our image to something more actual, we also wanted to improve the content we presented and each page has its own story:

The Homepage

As the main landing page for our visitors, we needed to communicate our message quickly and clearly, and give easy access to the main areas of the website. Instead of the video reel and the welcome-blah-blah we had on the old website (a paragraph users are used to skip over), we decided to showcase some of our projects. We picked 5 projects of various types and for each of them we created a JavaScript powered parallax effect. Right below we created 3 boxes inviting users to the main parts of our website: the team, the projects and our Magento services website.

As planned, the layout and copywriting drives a lot more of the traffic to the projects where the visitors are most likely to make a decision on our services.

The Agency

In the past, the agency page had 4 paragraphs of text on 2 columns and it was very formal, offering little value. On the new design, we decided to show our entire team and to make the text more informal and fun to read. So we organized a photo-shoot and took pictures of each of us in standing up and crouching, then created the group picture using HTML and CSS; we opted for this instead of a group photo, so we have better control over the position of the photos in the page, and also so that it’s easy to add new photos of members who join the team.

The Portfolio

This was the page we dedicated our focus to the most: in the old design, we presented a picture for each project and a link so whoever checks can see the final result of our work. But we realized that not only the result matters, but also the process, and we decided to write a detailed presentation for each project, where we explain the challenges and the decisions we took. The pages include rich graphics pointing out important details as well as a detailed list of what we did on the project.

Services

On the old website, the description of our services included a lot of technical details, but our clients weren’t interested in acronyms, they were interested in the final result and couldn’t care less about the technical blah-blah. So the new content for the page included our services explained in plain English, ordered by the project timeline, everything from the initial consulting to the post-launch marketing.

Conclusions

The new website was an instant hit, our conversion rate skyrocketed and by the time clients contacted us, they were already familiar with our portfolio, services and team.

This confirmed once again, that "content is king" and that a good design is a usable design. Visitors don’t have time to read paragraphs (except for blogs, where you obviously read quite a few in this post), so you need to catch their attention and organize content so it’s easy to scan.

The truth is, we’ve wanted to do this for a long time, however we kept making excuses not to do so:

• we don’t have a ton of traffic, so why put in a lot of time to write for only a few people?
• we’re so busy, we won’t have time to write articles often enough
• who do we write for? other professionals? clients?
• should we write in English or Romanian?
• who will write the articles? the management? the senior designers and developers? the whole team?
• what should we write about?

We finally decided it’s time to go for it. We’re going to write our articles in English, because everybody speaks it anyway and so we can address a greater audience, and everybody in the team who has something to say can post an article. So we’ll write about:

• our projects, whether they’re internal or for clients
• our work, and the decision process we have in our designs and programming
• technical tips and tricks on design or programming
• technology related articles
• things we like and things we hate
• and other general announcements

So, if you like our work, we’re looking forward to having you as our reader. You should also follow us on Twitter and on Facebook, as that’s the place where we’ll post about many nice things we come across.