The Surfulater.com website has just undergone an extensive makeover. We did the original site in-house and even though we were pleased with the results it lacked the professional look and feel we felt was necessary as part of the Surfulater package.
We requested comments on the site, as it was, and were fortunate to get some very good feedback from a variety of sources. This process helped us formulate and bed down our requirements for the revamped site.
The next step was to search for professional web design companies to do the work for us. I contacted several local (Australian) companies, one a clearing house with a supposedly large number of web firms on their books and never received a reply. They guaranteed a reply within 24-48 hours!! You seriously have to wonder why these companies request folks like us contact them when they don’t even bother replying. And why do they run Google ads?
So I started looking further afield. A found an interesting site where designers bid for for work, showing examples of their designs along the way. This was tempting but had some downsides I didn’t care for.
After spending some time looking at various peoples work I started a dialog with a few and finally settled on Weevox Studios to work with us. Up until now I’ve always used local firms to do this type of work, so there was some trepidation using someone offshore.
I’m pleased to say it worked out pretty well. You have the usual time zone issues, but I am well and truly used to that, so it wasn’t a big deal. That said if I wasn’t able to respond outside of normal business hours the entire project would have taken quite a bit longer. There was a bit more back and forth than I would have liked, but I trust you will agree that we’ve ended up with a good looking, practical and useful web site. A site that we hope gets the Surfulater message across.
We still have more to do, such as reworking and adding more information and we are looking at bringing the Web shop in from the cold so it has the same look as the Surfulater web site. Stay tuned.