How long does it take to build a website?

Projects vary depending on the scope. When we first tackle a website we will usually inform the client on cost, timeline and projected delivery date. Sometimes the request of the client extend the timeline, but careful planning is key in assuring the planned launch date is successfully met.

How much does a website cost?

Websites can range anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 dollars depending on the scope of the project. Web development is a complex and detailed process. Every site is different. We encourage you to contact us to get your own custom quote for your project.

How does the design of a website effect traffic?

When designing sites we always take into account the best way to display the supplied content. Search engines crawl sites in specific ways, so we always take this into account when designing web solutions. The more detailed and accurate the planning of the design and front end code can drastically improve your sites traffic.

What is the process in creating a website from scratch?

First we take any branding materials you may have and base our suggestions for the design on your core values and offerings. This process can be easy or complicated depending on the purpose and target market for your site. For more details or information contact us.

Do you redesign or work with existing websites?

Yes, Of course. We are knowledgeable in the workings of existing domains and can redesign, Optimize or take over hosting for your existing site. We offer competitive pricing on hosting and maintenance solutions and can assist in spring boarding your site into a useful marketing tool.

How many people work on building a website?

The workload can vary depending on the scope of the project. Usually we work with a tight ship of 1 designer/creative director and 1 to 2 developers. You are guaranteed to get personalized service and always have access to brainstorm, comment or ask questions any time throughout the design and development process, and beyond.

Can I manage my own content in my site?

Yes, We work with some of the most popular open source content management systems (CMS) and can suggest the most appropriate system to fit your needs.

What is a CMS system?

Content management system. This allows people with no design or development skills to access website content, make edits, create new content and manage their own site content.

What options of CMS systems do you offer?

We offer a full set of content management systems and can customize any system to fit the individual needs of the client. A couple systems we work with are; Wordpress, Joomla, CMS Made Simple, Drupal, OSCommerce and much more.

What is a blog?

A blog is one of the best ways to keep your content fresh and search engine friendly. Blogs are set up on a post system and can be archived by tags, keywords, date posted and more. We encourage all of our clients to have a blog. It is your best tool in keeping your website traffic up.

Do you work with companies with small budgets?

Yes, Of course. We can advise you as to the best solution for your website and can suggest simple alternatives to keep costs low and meet your defined budget.

What is the advantages and disadvantages of a full flash site?

More and more full flash sites are dying out as the main offering for large companies. Simply because flash websites are almost invisible to search engines. There are ways of making flash sites visible on most search engines but requires extensive work to accomplish. Most of our solutions balance HTML and Flash and create a unity that ensures high rankings on search engines and that WOW factor you looking for with flash and motion graphics.

Full flash sites have their place, and can be very useful marketing material. Please visit our flash work section to see some successful executions of full flash and partial flash sites.

Do you do flash advertisements?

Yes, and it’s one of our greatest pleasures. We can concept, design and execute flash banner campaigns that can help promote your site traffic in a unique and dynamic way.

Do you manage advertising campaigns?

Yes, from simple Google AdWords campaigns to cross media advertisements on multiple sites.

How do I advertise on google?

With us! We can show you how, or take care of it for you.

What is your process in creating online animated banner advertisements?

First we talk to our clients and find out what they are looking to accomplish with the ad, what target market they are looking at and how the brand can work with the ads. We then conceptualize, brainstorm and storyboard out our ads to give the full effect of the campaign. We will then execute the ad based on the defined cues outlined in the storyboards.

Do you have more examples of print work?

Although it is not our main focus we do execute some interesting print materials for our clients. The web never does them much justice, but we are working on posting our examples soon. Stay tuned!

Do you do print advertising?

Yes, We work with some of Long Islands premier publications to ensure your ads hit their target. Read more in our advertising service section.

Have more questions?

Please if you have more we would be glad to answer them and post them here. Please fill out the comment section below for more answers to any un-listed questions.

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Media is our vice. We are all strapped to it and bombarded with it on a day to day basis. Whether we watch TV every night, update our facebook wall on our mobile phone, or visit a website. You name it media is anywhere and everywhere. We cast our lives online, rush home for a new season of Entourage or play video games all night long. We are media junkies, strapped to it like never before in our history. Media gives me a career so I’m all for it, but do we really need to be so media centric?

I’ve been to a couple different countries in my travels and I’ve never seen another country so focused on entertainment and media as much as the United States. Movie stars are the highest paid people in our culture, not doctors or scientists, which is seemingly odd. In media’s defense, when you look at your day to day life, you’ll notice how much your life revolves around entertainment. The more money that is made of people clicking an ad or paying 12 bucks for a movie, the more those overpaid stars and entertainment companies get. Don’t get me wrong here, I love technology but I think we need to take the time to disconnect more.

Put your phone down, don’t update your status today, or shut off that TV for a night and just talk to someone face to face. We so easily fall into the outlets and social easements that many companies exploit everyday, why not fight the man and un-strap yourself once in a while. Life tends to slow down a bit when you take yourself away from all of what technology and media has provided for us.

Media advertising works. They taunt you to click, explore and buy. They put ads in video games, in you iPhone apps, over your videos, and who know where else. As time progresses more and more advertisers are finding new and unique ways to advertise. Although not all are are bad and can be useful, most are misleading or obtrusive. So say fight the man, turn off your phone, get off facebook for 10 minutes and try something more basic. Plain old conversation with no bells and whistles.

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I’ve been working on a new design for Vectorloft V3. As they say, one of the hardest things to design for is yourself. So needless to say its a painstaking process. I hope to have the new site with all the bells and whistles I’ve been learning over the past 2 years. Be ready for a site rich with new media concepts and lots of Web 2.0 and 3.0 styling. But for now I’ll post my projects here until we get this new site up.

Below is a short-listing of projects developed by Matthew Cassella (Vectorloft LTD). Projects vary is scope but display the full range competencies I hold.

Newsday.com
http://www.newsday.com
An experiment in new media, the new newsday.com required a multitude of collaboration with many different agencies in order to execute the final product. Although the site is still not fully completed, it shows the design management skills necessary to accomplish a large scale interactive portal. All CSS, front end development and design logic managed by myself. Without the support of the awesome design and development team at newsday.com this site would have never been a reality.

Red Bull Racing
http://staging.vectorloft.com/redbullracing/
Contracted to better organize the Red Bull Racing web portal. The design takes cues from the original design and combines a grunge style with a large array of ease of use upgrades. Media and featured news is displayed more readily and organizes the content to allow for the visitor to create a more full featured environment for visitors to better choose their path through the multitude of media contained within the site.

Skyline New York
http://skyline.vectorloft.com
Interactive portfolio showcasing each product set of Skyline New York. Matthew Cassella compiled the needs of the client into a fully interactive solution. Showing the large set of products complete with call to actions for the internal marketing initiatives.

DirecTV HD Demo
http://www.vectorloft.com/directv/
Contracted as a Senior Designer for the 2007 holiday term Matthew Cassella created this HD Demo to showcase the advantages of HD television to DirecTV.com visitors.

Coldwell Banker Interactive CD
http://www.vectorloft.com/coldwellbanker/
Interactive CD developed based on the Coldwell Banker brand to showcase “The Art of Selling Your Home” and the advantages to using Coldwell Banker.

Time Sports ReDesign
http://staging.vectorloft.com/timesports/
Technologic innovation was the theme of this new interactive face for the largely popular cycling brand. Redesign includes easements for more enhanced product focus as well as interactive elements to stimulate the view on landing for increased conversion rates.

EC Dormer Redesign (In-development)
http://staging.vectorloft.com/ecdormer/index.html
Idea was concepted as a different approach on standard web design. Pages are set up as tabs which open up to show content. Idea is still in development but portrays the clean cut look and feel which coincided with the re-branding project.

Service Channel Flash Demo
http://servicechannel.com/sc/login/demo.html
Contracted on freelance for Studio 150 this demo was solely developed by Matthew Cassella in flash. Concept was submitted with basic instructions for functionality. All animation and creative interactivity was concepted and executed based on the aesthetic of the designed site.

Long Island North Shore Heritage Area
http://www.linorthshoreheritagearea.com/
Design and development of this site portal includes a fully interactive CMS system, which was updated by Vectorloft for increased functionality.

The Globesity Festival
http://theglobesityfestival.org
Fully controllable Wordpress customization included video upload capability and full control by the company over content of the site. Vectorloft designed and developed the site aesthetic look and feel and carried the brand through all advertising materials for the festival.

Brookside Environmental
http://www.brooksideweb.com
Redesign of an outdated web site. The new design infuses a large array of client taken photos to display the large breadth of service the company holds. With the redesign, conversion rates on the domain were doubled from the previous design.

BigHip
http://www.bighip.com
This email marketing company jump-started their brand and consumer appeal with a brand new look stemming from initial logo designs. Vectorloft transformed the dated site design with full creative revision and site wide copy revisions transforming the web portal to attract new set of customers. With almost 10,000 hits a day BigHip boosted their sign up rate 15% over the previous quarter.

Razorshark
http://www.vectorloft.com/razorshark/
Looking for a new exciting look Matthew Cassella encapsulated this company’s brand into a site wide visual experience. Taking cues from the name the site was developed with creativity in mind. Playing on the deep-sea shark concept the site creates a unique visual experience.

Studio Roya
http://www.studioroya.com
Based on graphic cues from this professional art director, Matthew Cassella developed a fully functional flash applet to display this artist’s diverse portfolio.

CTA
http://staging.vectorloft.com/cta/
Conventional approach on a Career Training site. Idea included a interactive header which allowed visitors to scroll through ideas and tips on landing to increase conversion goals.

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I’ve been struggling with this issue as I’m sure a lot of people out there are as well. But have crawled the web and found a great solution for all of you wrestling with IE6 and its horrible rendering capabilities. Its easy and fast and you don’t have to load a whole new style sheet to accomplish.

The Code:

#divbox {
margin: 3px;
}

Now in this case, left and right margins will be doubled. With floated divs display:inline; will solve most of your problems.

Example:

#divbox {
margin: 3px;
float:left;
display:inline;
}

But what if your having trouble with top or bottom margins. Well there is a simple solution. Since IE 6 sucks, you have to create 2 different styles for margin.

The Code:
#divbox {
margin: 3px;
_margin: 0px;
}

The first declaration will be read by all cool browsers (IE 7, Fire Fox, Safari) but as we all know IE6 is dumb so it will read the last margin declaration. Quick and easy. Figured I’d share this since I took me a while to find it out there.

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In designing web solutions sometimes we forget to include some of the basic techniques in order to make a page stand out. It’s simple and most creatives think of it but for some, it isn’t put into emphasis enough. Backgrounds are essential in creating stimulating web pages that pop out at the visitor. Whether it be a repeating pattern or a drop shadow behind the main interface the background adds depth and a dynamic feel to any web GUI. Standard web GUI width should span a maximum of 900px in order to make sure all monitors are able to see the bulk of the main site. SO when we create layouts is always important to include space in order to show what the background of the site will look like. Another key idea is to always show your design comp within a browser. Sizing is a large issue when it comes to the development of web sites, as we all know and showing a client the design in its environment is always the best to minimize confusion.

I have been in countless companies where the focus is set on the main body of the site without the thought of what the site will look like within the browser. Clients sign off on the design and a solid background is coded taking away much needed depth in the design of the page. As designers, we must think of the whole picture. Incorporating depth and establishing the full environment is key! Give your design BACK! and bring your design into the light.

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Popularity: 65% [?]