Services: Custom Web Design

Web design is our passion. We’ve been professionally employed designing, creating and building for the web since Year One, when dinosaurs like Lynx roamed the twisted pairs, and we continue to design bleeding edge sites today. We’ve won awards, built everything from five page brochure sites to million page impression per day enterprise monsters and worked on just about every platform out there, using more technologies than you can spell out with a can of alphabet soup.

And we’d be delighted to help you with your project, no matter how small. Or large.

If you don’t know where to begin, we’re here to help; we can craft you a solution from the ground up – and our technical staff will speak to you in plain language rather than a bunch of technical jargon. If you just need some additions or some tuning to your existing presence, we’ll be happy to assist with that too.

As we’re not beholden to any technology, we’ll not try to squeeze you into “our product” or “Web 2.0”. What we will do is listen to your needs and desires, and help you formulate an online strategy and technology base that fits your project – and your budget.

Be it a flat HTML brochure site, a full Flash site, a content managed solution, an entire integrated identity package, ecommerce, mobile friendly design or even integrating your existing site into a template solution, we can handle it.

And rest assured your project will be done professionally, on time, and in budget. You’ll only be billed – and not overbilled – for the time spent.

So How Does the Process Work?

A few simple – but absolutely necessary – steps are taken to generate the best sites possible. We take pride in our methodologies; they’ve worked across hundreds of sites and they’ll work for yours.

We Listen to You

Our first step is to sit down with you and determine exactly how your online presence should take shape. We’ll ask you pertinent questions regarding your campaign that will let us determine all the pieces that need to be integrated.

We Explain What We’re Going to Do

After compiling the data you’ve given us, we’ll present you with a proposal that will explain exactly what we’re going to do for you, how we’re going to do it and how much the effort will cost. All in plain language, so you know exactly what you’re getting.

We Start Getting Creative

No, not with the hours we’re billing. Using your stated goals, identity and feedback, we start designing. And, as we value client feedback, we keep you in the loop so you can help tailor the design to your desires.

We Start Building

Once you’ve approved exactly how your site will look and function, we take it from concept to reality. And our methods are a little different:

We code by hand. Period. You’re not going to be getting work that’s output by a codemonkey using DreamWeaver who learned how to do web sites at the local learning annex last week. And your site won’t have a lot of extraneous code that WYSIWYG developers leave behind.
Your site will conform to W3C standards. We validate all site designs for maximum compatability across platforms and browsers. [Although we’ll admit that we’re well & truly done with IE6.]
We build here. Your site is 100% American made, in scenic Portland, ME. We don’t outsource. You’ll never have to worry about talking to a guy named “Steve” who sounds like he usually has curry for lunch.

We Add the Bells, Whistles & the Machine That Goes ‘Ping’

If your design calls for some fun stuff like JavaScript powered carousels, sliders or motion, something with some real horsepower like Canvas, Dashcode, WebKit or HTML5 or we’re doing some application work in Flash, now’s the point it gets bolted in.

We Test

We take the time to beat the site up using different browsers on different platforms. Truthfully, this happens throughout the building process – but we take a final spin through to make sure everything works everywhere. Currently, we test using IE8, IE9, Win/FF, Mac/FF, Mac/Safari, Win/Chrome & Mac/Chrome. If appropriate [or we’re curious], we test on a variety of mobile browsers. We also punch it through the Validator at W3C to make sure it matches standards [notice this page does – try this]. And consider it our official stance that IE6 & 7 are finally dead. We just wish somebody would put a stake in its heart and take a real swing at IE8 & 9.

You Approve

We walk you through the site for final approval. We’d much rather have any issues ironed out before launch and have a happy customer than rush to be out and end up broken.

We Launch

And out we go. You’ve now got a live, viable and professional site at your disposal. From here, we enter either maintenance or expansion mode, depending on the course of your project.

Customer Service

Last – and no where near least – Liquid Anvil prides itself on comprehensive customer service. If you’re not happy, we’re not happy. We proudly stand behind every web site we build, and we do not miss deadlines. Your success is our success – and we like success a bunch. You know, like bacon.

You really made it all the way down here? Wow.