Successful Web Sites Start with Seneca

You have big dreams for your web site. Choose Seneca to make them real!

If you've done any amount of looking for web development assistance, you've no doubt realized that there are thousands of quite capable programmers who lack professional design sensibility. And thousands more graphic designers who can design beautiful web pages that won't work in any browser other than their own.

We offer you the best of both worlds: A traditional graphic design studio with long-term experience in the online world. Seneca has been at the forefront of online design and marketing since 1988, when our trusty 300 baud U.S. Robotics modem was first hooked up to our network. We were there for GEnie, AOL, AppleLink, CompuServe, E-World (we were beta testers!), and for Netscape 1.0.

Seneca designed our first client web site in 1995. Since then, we've designed and produced sites for the Joyce Foundation, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, the International Housewares Association, Lobster Gram, Francis W. Parker School, and many other companies and individuals. We've helped a lot of print designers get started with web design too, providing the behind-the-scenes knowledge and coding abilities they need to get their beautiful site designs working on the web.

How does this unique combination of creative talent and Internet expertise benefit you? First, we'll help your site reach its target audience, since we have a solid handle on where that audience is coming from and where it's going. Second, your site will look great and behave correctly regardless of browsers, platforms, or display devices your market is using.

And third, you'll have us on your side. When we help you create (or redesign, or just maintain) your site, we buy into your organization and its mission. Ask any of our web design clients (names/contact info provided upon request) about our long-term commitment and support; they'll tell you how valuable it's been to them since the start.

Anne-Marie, Seneca's President, is the author of Professional Web Site Design from Start to Finish (2001, HOWDesign Books), an award-winning treatise on how to guarantee a successful web site development process and ongoing presence for your company or your clients.

Call Anne-Marie at 312-946-1100 to learn more about how Seneca can help your company create a vibrant, successful web site at an affordable price, or use our handy Request a Quote form to tell us more about your web design project.

Development for Success — The Seneca Method

What's the main quality that signifies a successful Web site? Is it when the site…

• Increases sales?
• Wins a "Cool Site of the Day" award?
• Generates lots of traffic?
• Answers a lot of tech support/service/product questions?
• Helps prospective customers "pre-qualify" themselves?
• Builds a cohesive community?
  

Answer: It depends. Do you want to generate a lot of site traffic? Or is your main goal to support your existing customers, and who cares how many looky-loo hits the site gets?

That's where we start with web design projects. We sit down with all the players we can gather together — you (the project manager), your IT people, any outside vendors you want involved, your MarComm staff — and develop a list of primary and secondary goals for your web site. You'd be surprised at how many you can come up with, and how different they can be. Then we work with you to rank them by priority. What's the main goal of the site?

Regardless of the size of the project, it's critical to get at the nub of the goals issue from the outset. Ignore it, and you end up with a site that tries to be all things to all people, succeeding at none, costing beaucoup bucks to create and maintain. Or a site where some goals (let's build a community! here's a bulletin board where we'll answer your questions!) inadvertently fight with others (we have no staff to answer your constant questions! read the FAQ instead!).

All subsequent work on your site — graphic design, content creation, production and testing — springs from and is checked against those initial discussions and decisions. Our team is focussed on your needs from start to finish.

We want your site to be successful, as you define success. Our own goal is that six months or a year down the line, when you're thinking about the impact your site has had on your business, you can confidently say, "That was the best thing we did this year."

Seneca Web Hosting

As an optional service for our web design clients, we can host your web site on our fast and stable Linux/Apache web server, located off-site and securely maintained 24/7. We've been hosting client sites since 1998 on the same server that hosts our own. You'll have complete FTP access, up to 25 e-mail accounts, a graphic web log analyzer, and more. Detailed specs and fees are in our PDF brochure: Seneca Web Hosting.

Site Maintenance and Support

Your web site needs to be updated and maintained on a regular basis to reflect your organization's growth and activities. We can help you keep the site current via an hourly, project-based, or quarterly retainer. Learn more about this service in our PDF brochure: Site Maintenance and Support Services