Q: What's your name and position in the company?
A: Paul Clarke, MD
Q: Describe your company in 5 words.
A: Friendly, Genuine, Cool and Professional
Q: What's your business philosophy?
A: Our aim is to provide a friendly one-to-one service delivering highly professional yet value for money services without any contracts.
Q: Describe your office environment.
A: It's a relaxed office with music playing, usually we stream a radio station, and what's played depends on who's in. If it's just me it will be Planet Rock! But usually it's Capital or BBC 6 Music or some such. Long periods of working silence are interspersed with funny interludes (usually YouTube inspired!)
Q: Describe how your team interact and work together.
A: Well apart from talking to each other like normal people do, we use DropBox to share files and develop on. This means it doesn't matter where we are we can always see and use the same things as we see when we're in the office.
Q: What makes you different from other web design companies?
A: I'm not sure we are THAT different to be honest. We probably do the same things as the other established companies in Sheffield. We may be a little less expensive, and we definitely provide a personal one-to-one system, and of course we do everything ourselves here from hosting to email marketing. I'm not sure if that makes us different.
Q: How do you get the majority of your business?
A: The vast majority remains word of mouth with some new business coming through our website.
Q: Describe how you manage projects from the initial client contact to completion and handover.
A: I deal with every customer myself from the start. Liam may be doing the design and Laura may be doing the development, but I do the quality control and make sure the customer is okay myself, whether I'm working on the project or not.
Q: What do you think is the most crucial element of creating a good client relationship?
A: Trust. There's no doubt in my mind about that. They have to trust us that we are not here to squeeze as much out of them as we can, and that we can do what we say we're going to do.
Q: How do you manage demanding clients?
A: Everybody is different aren't they. Some just use up more of our time than others, it's swings and roundabouts, so we don't mind, and we try to be as accommodating as we can.
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: Although that sounds like a straightforward question, it's actually a very good one, because 9 times out of 10 the client wont know a pixel from a hosting platform. So asking them to make sure they are comparing apples with apples is good advice but not always possible. We wrote an article about how to go about this and one of the recommendations was to phone them all first, and see what that experience was like. Some wont answer, some give you automated options, some talk gobbledegook.. Anyway, best see the article really :)
Q: Where do you see your company in 10 years time?
A: Pretty much as it is today really, perhaps slightly larger in terms of staff but not much. I don't want us to become an unweildy faceless corporate, and I want to develop websites not manage staff.
Q: Where do you see the web design industry in the future?
A: I think in the future it will be all about mobile responsive design. More developers will work for technology companies providing plug-ins and custom widgets for some framework or other, and the designers will just slot them in for clients using easy peasy tools.
Q: What computers do you have use in your offices, PCs or Macs?
A: Both PC and Mac
Q: How was your company name chosen?
A: I wanted something with "web" in it, and something short. I'm not particularly happy with the result to be honest!
Q: If you were to give your clients one tip on how to get the most from their website what would it be?
A: Get blogging!! Get Social!
Latest Work
