Brand Aspect Ltd

Q: What's your name and position in the company?
A: Andy Fairweather - Owner

Q: Describe your company in 5 words.
A: Maximising client returns on websites

Q: What's your business philosophy?
A: To ensure that a website isn't just a brochure but an active part of a companies sales cycle. Optimising and improving a websites performance is key to making it work for the business.

Q: Describe your office environment.
A: Lots of techie equipment buzzing and humming away, we're always ready to do ad hoc youtube films at a moments notice meaning things like teleprompters and video lighting sit in the background. It's fun and it's great to have creative flexibility here.

Q: Describe how your team interact and work together.
A: The work starts with a brief and then is divided in to logical sections from design to content and coding it is apportioned as necessary

Q: What makes you different from other web design companies?
A: We offer more than a website, we continuously strive to make them better and more effective for you whilst having the tools and resources to offer full brand collatoral and multichannel marketing campaigns

Q: How do you get the majority of your business?
A: Primarily through referrals from perviously happy customers and also people in the marketing industry who are good advocates for the work that we do.

Q: Describe how you manage projects from the initial client contact to completion and handover.
A: initial contact, breif with coaching, proposal, project commences, milestones reached, testing, signoff.

Q: What do you think is the most crucial element of creating a good client relationship?
A: being responsive to challenges and more importantly responding to communications. It's so often that we hear a web design firm can't be reached to make changes to websites. We take as our duty to ensure that this never happens.

Q: How do you manage demanding clients?
A: If a client is demanding that shows that they care about there business, we set milestones for the work we deliver and where possible leave slack in areas that could reasonably expect a little scope creep.

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: At the earliest opportunity have a call or ideally a face to face meeting. Make sure the web designer understands your vision for the business and what your looking to achieve. You also need to ensure that the proposal and costings aren't laced with jargon and everything makes sense or at a minimum can be explained by the web designer that you choose. Always buy your domain name and never work with a company that trys to own this on your behalf.

Q: Where do you see your company in 10 years time?
A: Over the last 10 years we've grown shrunk and now grown again, but the approach we've taken has been to focus on building our business on an atomic model, we expect the business to grow by 25% per year with the extra revenue streams of video and training playing a critical role in the years to come. We want to take over the world one website at a time.

Q: Where do you see the web design industry in the future?
A: We've moved to a point where websites are becoming a commodity with many hosting services offering free website building systems, this has taken away the bottom end of the market and web design firms need to adapt to this. The buzz around social has depleted over the last few years but the real future lies with video. Youtube is the second largest search engine behind google and web design businesses need to embrace this not only for there clients but for themselves to survive as audiences increasingly look for quick results.

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

Q: How was your company name chosen?
A: Back in 2006 we went through a name change, a working title was Aspect's of brand and that quickly morphed in to Brand Aspect. It needed the word aspect, since we had at the time two other strings to our bow Aspect Wear (which was corporate workwear and now no longer exists) and Aspect Printing which we still operate and forms core part of the business. The brand element reflects the fact that we build brands but also acts as an umbrella over the other parts of the business

Q: If you were to give your clients one tip on how to get the most from their website what would it be?
A: Your website can always be improved and constant revisiting, testing and monitoring will give you the tools to know what is performing well and what needs improvement. Never be satisfied and always keep an eye on the objectives for the site.