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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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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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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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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Atmospheric Creation…yea I’m making up terms again but its a great idea to keep in mind when designing. To create an atmosphere, a presence, and experience… That is what makes a site different and impactful. I’ve written about cookie cutter web design before which is the complete opposite of this idea.

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Its all about having a website take control over your computer. Everyone wants control over the page they are browsing through. Yet some designers/developers feel the need to use JavaScript or some other coding language to resize a window or keep it at a certain size. My personal opinion is to stay out of the users ability to control what is on a site. Once we starting forcing the user to either keep the window open or do something they don’t necessarily want we create a negative user experience.

Why is this negative? Well think of it this way. Say a user is browsing the web in a small window while working on other things on their screen. they open your website and BAM! it resizes to the full width and hight of their screen. Although we would like to think when someone is going to your site that they will have no distractions and become totally focused on what you have created for them. This is rarely the case. With the emergence of multi-tab browsing your site is probably one of the multiple sites the user is currently browsing.

The work around is to hint at the idea of allowing full screen or auto resize by a button or witty line implying that their experience will be a whole lot cooler. Once we stray from the idea that the user/visitor should be in total control we lose positive experience points.

Through design and layout we work to guide the user through a site not force them to take a path. Let them choose…

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When we create a website we follow a creative vision or project plan which guides in the production or successful web experiences. Throw a CMS into the mix and we must take into account every situation that would arise when a client goes to make changes to the original design. Pretty much idiot proofing every possible detail so that the design of the site does not lose aesthetic when items are added. Uploading pictures, writing sections, adding documentation are all functions of these types of systems. So what is the problem?

Seems like this would create less work to manage a site if all the control is with the owner, not true. When we develop websites there are certain guidelines and optimization techniques that we use to create a smooth operating system. Images and online documents need to be a certain size in order to speed up performance, files need to be named according to guidelines, and many other factors come into play. Open source CMS systems are available for incorporation into web designs which cut down development costs, yet the problem with these systems is that they can be very general and sometime fall short in the functionality that is needed for a specific client.

Custom systems are more fine tuned to the clients vision yet require a decent amount of development and creative direction to create an intuitive well designed interface. For the ill informed, this is an important ideas to keep in mind when you are looking for website development. CMS systems cut out management costs but require larger start up fees to develop the initial system. When shopping for a design company, make sure that the administration interface is as well designed as the site itself. Otherwise you may be stuck with a bare bones administration with no inherent flow or ease of use design.

Things to factor in when building a new website:

1. How often will I be updating my site?
2. Will I need to upload documents?
3. How much do I want to spend?
4. Do I want support for my site?
5. How much control do I want to pay for?
6. Will I be able to update the design with the CMS still in place
7. Do I know enough about web trends to keep my site up to date?
8. Do I have the time to manage my own website

Although there are many other questions that may go along with web development this list gives a basic overview of what to expect when diving into the world of the web and having a successful site. Popular websites need constant attention. Remember the web is a source of up to date information. Sites that are created and not managed correctly or fall stale do to lack of attention will get sucked into the black hole of the internet. Getting no hits and not doing their job of informing the people that land on your page. So if your in the market for a new website and want all the control to do-it-yourself make sure you have the time to keep your site up to date.

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The ability to take a brand and create a unique user experience is essential to creating the best solution possible for a company. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of wire frames showing the customer the idea behind the design and inherent flow that goes along with the creative idea…Yet some websites fall into the cookie cutter aesthetic all too often. The sites we create look different, have a certain theme and institute some type of feel with their audience. This is the idea that continues to reflect positive results.

So where do we draw the line, good design takes time, but some companies want speed and perfection… How do we accomplish such innovation under such tight time constraints? The key is keeping your creative team as well as your clients happy with constant updates on progress and feedback. Estimate a time frame for a project before starting, this allows the time needed to create a winning design that will be both give your team the time needed to have fun with the project as well as not have you pulling your hair out when the client wants to see something faster than the original plan, rushing the creative.

Surprises within a project are only good if they involve shorter estimated time frames than originally estimated. All in all, its about creating something different than the average. There are so many new web technologies at our fingertips. The essential idea is to use what you need, don’t over power and create with the user in mind.

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Time and time again I run into the issue of having to explain my creative process to my clients. The creative mind works in such a way that people who are not creative or don’t think creatively, are not prone to understand the scope of a project or the detail involved in producing a creative project that is unique and successful.

As I sit in my office and take a break from the usual, playing world of warcraft as my 65 druid, yes I’m a geek, I can’t help but think about the depth of detail that is involved in producing such a game. WOW is one of the most unique online experiences I have ever well… experienced… the detail and vastness of the environments captivate me into believing that I am part of the world they have created.

We can take a cue from such games as web designers. Blizzard has successfully encapsulated a major audience which continues to grow every day. Countless people are poking around the world that they have created for the user and raking in a cool approximate 1.6 Billion a year. Now that signifies a success. So what are the cues we can take as designers, well we try to create the same type of feeling with our websites, flash animations or what have you… Bottom line captivate your audience. Take the time to add that extra detail, that small innuendo or reference to your creative vision.

Also don’t hesitate to enjoy the creativity that you create… I get this feeling everytime I create something that I love. I sit back, look into what I created and smile knowing that my mind came up with something that is so pleasing to the eye. Remember your professional titles of “Creative Professional” or “Graphic Designer” only mask the fact that your an artist at heart…but businesses don’t hire artists… So sit back relax, create and enjoy.

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