Feathering Your Online Nest
If you're reading this, chances are we don't need to sell you on the value of having a website. The question now is, how do you go about choosing the right web designer to create it for you?
Our Philosophy
At Lucky Birds Media, we believe the following:
1) In web design, form MUST follow function. Your website can be a thing of absolute beauty, but if it doesn't work properly, it's worthless.
2) Form follows function, but it follows it very, very closely. Any high school kid (or younger!) can slap together a few pages and call it a web site. We believe that a good website has thoughtful and consistent design both on its face and in its infrastructure. We pay extra careful attention to usability — if your front page has a navigation menu, for example, that menu will stay in the same place throughout your entire site. With a Lucky Birds design, your users won't spend time figuring out how to use your site, they'll spend time absorbing the content your site holds.
3) Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Web design technology presents a lot of options for bells and whistles. Things can blink, or spin, or beep, or bounce. Pretty neat, but what's the point? How do those distractions help communicate your message? At Lucky Birds Media, we think of your content as a work of art, and your website simply as an elegant frame. A good frame is there to help display the art, to make it accessible, and in some cases to subtly complement it, but the frame is not the main attraction. If users leave your website saying "What a great website!" instead of "What a great actor/photographer/store/company!" then you've hired the wrong web designer.
If you found yourself nodding along with these three points, then look no further — you've found your web design firm.
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The Process
Here's a breakdown of the basics of the process — if you already know this stuff, feel free to skip ahead to the portfolio.
The first thing you need is a domain name. Your domain name is essentially the street address of your new online home. Our domain name, for example, is luckybirdsmedia.com. That one happened to be free (lucky for us!) but your preferred domain name, if it's a common one, might be taken. We can help you research available domain names, and suggest alternatives, should your first choice be unavailable.
The next thing you need is a hosting service. If the domain name is like your street address, the hosting service is like the plot of land where you're going to build your online house. Lucky Birds Media does not provide web hosting, just as neither your architect nor your interior designer sells you your land. We can, however, recommend a service, and an appropriate hosting plan, and we'll do all the legwork to get you set up. Once your hosting service is in place, all you need to do is continue making the payments to them, just as you would the rent or mortgage on a piece of property, for as long as you want your website to be visible to the public.
Once you've picked your street address and bought your land, the next step is to build your house — that's where the web design process begins. First we discuss what you want your site to accomplish, and who your audience is. Next we cater your site to meet those goals and serve that audience. Layout, color, font, images, size, organization — we take it all into account. Following our discussion, you'll get a mock-up of what your site will look like based on your preferences. You can make any and all necessary tweaks or adjustments before the actual building of the site begins, and we'll keep you posted as construction proceeds, so you can be sure you're getting exactly what you want.
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Portfolio
In addition to this site, here are some of the others we've created. Click the images to launch the sites in new windows.
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What We'll Do For You
Creating and publishing a website is a complex process, and can seem a bit mysterious to the uninitiated. At Lucky Birds Media, we're happy to involve you in this process as much or as little as you like. Some people have a clear picture in mind of exactly what they want, and they just need someone to execute their vision. Others don't have the time to sit down and conceive a whole website out of thin air, and would prefer someone else do the heavy lifting. We're perfectly comfortable working with either extreme, or anywhere in the middle.
We also believe your site should be as finely crafted behind the scenes as it is on the outside. Sloppy code, even if it's not visible to the user, can slow down performance and disrupt your site's appearance across different web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Safari) and operating systems (e.g. Windows and Mac). We guarantee a good looking website with thoughtfully and efficiently structured code that will maximize your users' experience, no matter what kind of computer or browser they're using.
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Contact
Another cardinal rule of web design is to never overwhelm your visitors with information — and we've come awfully close to breaking that rule here.
It's a lot to take in, we know. Please feel free to contact us at any time with any question you have, no matter how small.
You can also contact us if you don't have any questions, and are ready for us to start work on your website!
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