It’s been almost a year and a half since launching our previous site and a lot has happened since then. Our client list has expanded and our talents and abilities have grown, so we’ve been long overdue for an upgrade.

The new site greatly improves the presentation of our client portfolio, organized by web design, print design and photography. The site is also built around a MySQL database for quick and efficient updating of information. As time went on, we found it more and more difficult to showcase the designs we are proud of to our perspective clients. Now we can post our latest and greatest works online immediately. Every business needs a showroom.

One of the biggest limitations many companies face is having a website that is out-of-date and hard to maintain. Their site doesn’t keep up with the growth and pace of their business. It’s important to make sure your company website is a tool for your marketing and sales departments, instead of overhead or just one more “to-do” obstacle for your staff to manage.

We invite you to browse through our updated portfolio and tell us what you think.

Check out the new blog at blog.teecompressed.com and tell us what you think!

T-Shirts are only $14 each with free shipping.

Visit our online store at TeeCompressed.com. There is a limited quantity available.

Here are a few of the t-shirt designs:

Shop now online at TeeCompressed.com.

It’s been just about 3 months, almost to the day, since our last post on Project Tee Compressed. We haven’t blogged about our progress but development has been moving full speed ahead. It’s hard to squeeze in the time to write about our progress and milestones, while at the same time actually doing the work.

We are, however, excited about the progress we’ve made with our new site at TeeCompressed.com. One of the decision points every project has is deciding when to launch. The critical question of when the design and programming is good enough to go-live. We eventually reach this point with all of our clients and many of them develop a strange hesitation, almost a “stage fright”… a failure to launch. They want to continually refine the site and tweak the design, constantly polishing the look and wordsmithing the content.

Launching a new website requires a leap of faith. At some point you have to weigh the cost of not launching the site and whether the last 5% of development and adjustments are worth the lost exposure and potentially lost sales of a delay. I’ve always been a fan of rapid prototyping (or rapid application development). Rapid development allows us to build the framework of a website quickly, paying as much attention to detail as possible, but not allowing it to slow down the process. Building a website (or any application) quickly, gives us a chance to get more done sooner and learn from any mistakes earlier in the process so that we can incorporate those lessons into the final design. Rather then waiting to make major changes after extensive development, we build quickly and make minor adjustments along the way, saving money and building a more useful and more testing final product.

The reason I bring up rapid development is because this was our process with building TeeCompressed.com. Our goal was to get the site up and running, make the search engines aware of our existence and get the clock ticking on organic rankings and exposure.

By having a under-construction page already live, we were seeing some search engine activity. We went through several more design revisions before going live but we always kept our number one goal to launch the site as soon as possible. We launched the site in first week in June. We registered a new toll free 877 phone number to route all customer service and order inquiries to a single point. In the past, we’ve written about using a service such as Ring Central (see our post on Expanding your Digital Office) and how important (and inexpensive) it is to represent your company correctly and invest in doing things right from the start. A simple toll free line can be as little as $4.99 per month.

After launching, our site had been live about 3 days and our toll free number had been live about 48 hours when we received our first phone call and request for a quote. The quote for almost $3000 in compressed t-shirts. This situation is a great example that we share with our clients, about the importance of launching the site as soon as possible and as soon as it is ready. Had we delayed our launch, we would have missed a great opportunity for getting a new customer and potential sale.

In the interest of keeping this post short, I’ll run the numbers to-date. As a prospective website entrepreneur,  you should expect to invest (over time) an appropriate amount to see things through to success.

• Total time elapsed: 25 weeks.
• Total time site has been live: 11 weeks.
• Purchased 5 domain names at about $9 each for a total of $45.
• Hosting fees at $39.95 per month x approx. 6 months.
• Toll free # at $4.99 per month.
• Total graphic design time to date: approx. 45 hours
• Total website development, search engine optimization & programming time: 75 hours.

Total cost to date:
120 hrs x standard $65 per hour rate = $7800 + $45 domains + $239 total hosting + $15 phone #

Approximate cost: $8099.00

Keep in mind that we were only working on this site part-time and very often had to stop work completely while we switched over to other client work. We’re excited about the Compressed T-shirt product and our site traffic is slowly growing but search engine optimization takes time. As the graph below shows, we are trending up. But as we say to all clients, even with a personal trainer, it takes months to get in shape. You don’t fire your trainer after 3 weeks because you don’t yet have that perfect body.

See all posts on Project Tee Compressed.

Some people try and create the actual 16 x 16 graphic by hand using Photoshop, but editing at that small level of detail can be difficult and you often end up with a blurry and pixelated square.

Here’s a quick and easy shortcut to creating your own custom favicon for your website or blog. Find any square graphic that you want to use as your favicon. Ideally, this graphic is a larger, detailed graphic, around 200 pixels by 200 pixels, such as our Durrani “D” graphic that we use for our logo mark, pictured here to the right. Any image you want to use is fine and can be a .jpg, .gif or .png file type.

Then just go to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/, browse to your graphic and click the button to generate your favicon. You can even optionally animate your graphic. The generated favicon file will be a compressed ZIP file that you can download to your computer and extract.

Transfer (FTP) the favicon.ico file that you downloaded, to the root folder of your website (the main public directory). A web browser automatically looks for the favicon.ico file when it loads your website and if found, will use it instead of the Internet Explorer or Firefox default icon. Now when someone visits or bookmarks your website, your new graphic will show up as the custom icon and will give your site a unique branding to stand out from the rest.

We used the “D” graphic above to create our site favicon. Here’s what the final image now looks like in a web browser:

One quick note – web browsers typically store or “cache” these files in a temporary folder on your computer each time you visit a website, so in order to get your new favicon file to show up, you might have to close and reopen your browser and/or clear out your browser temporary internet files. You can also try pressing the CTRL key and F5 key at the same time to force the page to load from scratch and refresh the all content and images.

That’s all there is to it. So go make your website bookmark and browser tab stand out from the rest with your new custom favicon.

The AddSpacetoYourLife.com website was built using Wordpress and customized into a powerful and flexible content management system. The existing website had already been up and running for years and so it was extremely important to maintain the current organic search engine rankings while completely rebuilding the site structure and content.

Here are the before and after shots of their website, completely designed and developed by Durrani Design. At the time of this post, the website is still under development but it can be found at www.AddSpacetoYourLife.com.

What is the average cost of developing a commercial website? (without hosting and domain name cost)

I have heard it can range from $1500 - $30,000.
What have you experienced?

As a website design agency, we are faced with this question daily. I took a few minutes to reply at the LinkedIn site and have reposted my answer here below. I think it’s an important question and something every business should consider.

Reply via Linkedin.

The secret question you are asking is, "What’s the best deal I can get, if I’m going to build a website for my business?". Don’t get me wrong, it’s a legitimate question. As the previous response stated, it depends on what you’re asking for. The range of complexity in web design is huge. Ask yourself, what do you want your website to do? What is the intended action I want a visitor to take when they visit my website? You don’t need a large-scale commercial website built using Flash if you are really just trying to sell a simple product… unless you are Sony, it’s wasted money.
If you were going to build a new house, would your first question to the builder be "What is the average cost of building a new house for my family?" We probably wouldn’t think of asking a simple question like that without first considering what your purpose for building the house is. How many rooms, is it for a family, what is the growth expected, will you need more rooms in a couple years (before you intend on building a new house) etc. Websites require no less planning then this. Sure, lots of 16 year old kids are running around building websites these days and you could get a great deal. But they are building websites… not businesses. Will your website convert on the goal you have set? I would sit down with someone who will help you think through your plan for your commercial website, not just what software you should use and how much it will cost. You could spend a ton of money and still not get the website you need, or you could spend a moderate amount and get your perfect online business. You get what you pay for these days. Not all websites are created equal. I’ve built many websites for $1500, as long as it fits the client’s needs.
Just remember, you are building a business, not a website. A website should fit snugly into your overall business objectives.
As they used to say in the days of dirt roads and horse drawn wagons… "choose your rut carefully… you’re going to be in it for the next 30 miles."

If you’re a member of LinkedIn, you can connect to me at: www.linkedin.com/in/durranijoe

Here are the before and after shots of the Knight & Carver website, completely designed and developed by Durrani Design. Their website can be found online at www.knightandcarver.com.

It’s important to spend your often limited resources on useful technology and functional things that actually serve a useful purpose to your startup business. That’s where voice-over IP (VOIP) or internet based telephone systems come in. At Durrani, technology is our business, so we are always looking for ways to implement new technologies that help our business run more efficiently.

We examined several services and decided upon RingCentral.com.With RingCentral.com our basic monthly subscription gives us up to 5 configurable extensions, a unified voice and fax line, voicemail on each extension, an automated attendant (a virtual operator that greets callers and allows them to select an extension or leave voice messages) and the ability to forward incoming calls to several other numbers, such as a cell phone, in sequential order or simultaneously. The service also includes a PC application that resides on your desktop so you can answer calls (with a headset) and monitor voicemail and fax messages. Each person with an extension can completely configure their own services down to the hours they want their phone to ring and how many rings it should ring for. Take for example my extension #101. I have it setup to ring on my office desktop first, then rollover to my cell phone. If I don’t pick up the call on either my desktop or cell phone, it rolls over to my RingCentral.com voicemail. I then get an email and optional text message notifying me of the new voicemail.

The system also automatically detects incoming faxes and converts them to your choice of document format, such as a PDF, TIFF, or JPG. And the fax gets emailed to your email account. You can also setup your desktop computer to automatically send any incoming faxes directly to an office printer. Faxes can also be directly sent to an individual extension number.

Any optional toll free numbers associated to your account are completely integrated to your system. Inbound calls can be routed to any extension or office phone. We have several 800 numbers (which only run about $5 per line per month) and we have them routed to separate office phones with unique voicemail systems to take messages and deliver them to designated staff.

RingCentral.com lets you manage your office and client communications virtually from everywhere. Not only is it significantly less expensive then traditional phone systems, it’s smarter and more convenient. All for less then $50 a month.

There are many other features we won’t get into here, but you can get your own free 30 day trial by clicking the banner below. Once you try RingCentral.com you won’t look back.