Draggard

Q: What's your name and position in the company?
A: Paulo Fino, systems architect

Q: Describe your company in 5 words.
A: Attentive, professional, multilingual, versatile, multi-skilled

Q: What's your business philosophy?
A: We have an individual approach to each client and provide them with reliable, efficient and flexible tools to enhance their businesses and to have a modern and professional online presence.

Q: Describe your office environment.
A: We all work online, which allows each member of the team to choose their preferred work environment. So everybody's happy and dedicated.

Q: Describe how your team interact and work together.
A: We work online from different countries building upon each other's skills. We keep project management centralised assigning tasks to those most suited to accomplish them. This makes us fast and efficient, and allows us to maintain prices at nearly freelance level.

Q: What makes you different from other web design companies?
A: We are scalable. Our arrangements allow us to quickly expand our team by tapping into a verified crowd of professionals with all the necessary skills. Our working scheme means we have no empty hours since using our time efficiently allows us to complete projects quicker, take on more work and thus earn more.

Q: How do you get the majority of your business?
A: Our main source of clients has been word to mouth, although we do some online advertisement and direct, face to face local marketing.

Q: Describe how you manage projects from the initial client contact to completion and handover.
A: We start with a free consultation to understand the client's needs and devise proposed solutions for each particular case. Once a decision is made, we compile a full list of requirements and a plan of action, approve them with the client, write an internal plan of works, assign tasks, and start building (generally, on our development servers visible to clients for full transparency). With bigger projects we also set milestones for individual groups of tasks and/or features.

Q: What do you think is the most crucial element of creating a good client relationship?
A: Being attentive to what clients want to achieve, being resourceful to offer reliable working solutions, and being absolutely honest.

Q: How do you manage demanding clients?
A: We provide a detailed list of all the work to be done and all the solutions to be used, get it agreed upon in writing before we start work, and stick to it. Any alterations to the original plan are possible, but are discussed and agreed upon in writing separately.

Q: If a client was trying to decide between a shortlist of web design companies, how would you recommend they go about selecting the right one for them?
A: I would go for those who offer free initial consultations and make a decision upon evaluating what these consultations give and the company's initial attitude. Professional web developers should be professional enough to be able to quickly assess client's needs and propose a set of solutions quickly enough, while charging only for real work done. I believe that in order to get something one has to give something.

Q: Where do you see your company in 10 years time?
A: We will definitely expand into the mobile application development market, since it's inevitably becoming a closely related field of business, and complex solutions should include mobile apps along with websites. Growing our base of crowd-sourced professionals will eventually transform our company into a comprehensive technical management service acting as a link between non-technical clients and the IT crowd.

Q: Where do you see the web design industry in the future?
A: Web design is converging with application development, and many websites are increasingly becoming online applications designed to provide all kinds of services through the internet. Narrow specialisation is becoming a thing of the past, and future web development will encompass not only graphic design and content management, but also increasingly complex software-as-a-service solutions.

Q: What computers do you have use in your offices, PCs or Macs?
A: PC

Q: How was your company name chosen?
A: We wanted our name to sound brave, strong and noble. Like a dragon. So we decided to come up with a dragon name. We also wanted it to stand out and be easy to remember, to pronounce, and to write. Plus, a close friend recommended it should also be a palindrome. Thus DraggarD was born.

Q: If you were to give your clients one tip on how to get the most from their website what would it be?
A: Regard your site as a tool and learn to use it. It's so much more than a brochure or a shop window.