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Creating Web Designs
Area company gives businesses online visuals
BRIDGEPORT — When the house at 586 Clinton Ave. was built about 115 years ago, the telephone was the height of communication achievement. Today, the three-story Victorian is home to a company whose business even Alexander Graham Bell couldn't have foreseen — Web site design.
You Got Web LLC grew out of Frank Borres' video production company American View Productions.
Borres, 49, hired Kurt Graser, 25, for American View about 2 years ago, but offered him a partnership in a new Web site design business — also offering maintenance, copywriting, research and domain registration, among other services — when Borres decided to spin off that portion of American View's growing business.
The two companies occupy part of the first and the second floors of the house, which has been restored. The formal dining room acts as a conference room, while the living room is a testament to early-20th-century America, down to the console radio and rotary-dial phone. One bedroom is now a screening room — complete with flat-screen television and leather seats — and Borres attached period-looking quilts to the walls of a closet to create a sound room. There's even a furnished guest room, for clients who need to spend the night.
"It has become the most important form of communication [for companies]," said Borres of Web site design, so it needed its own business. "We noticed this was the one thing [marketing tool] we were recommending to everybody."
The biggest challenge, Borres said, was picking a name; You Got Web is a take-off on that classic cry from America Online, "You've got mail."
The six-month-old company has two full-time employees, but also hires designers as needed, and tries to match specific designers' strengths with the needs of individual clients. According to Borres, they have yet to break the $250,000 mark in revenues.
The difference in You Got Web's approach to design, Borres said, is that they analyze a customer's target market and build the site around that.
For example, the Bridgeport Port Authority needed an inexpensive, easily navigable site, so the design has all the information accessible from one page, which means the user doesn't have to click on three or four links to find a ferry timetable.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the site they designed for Specialized Packaging Group. There, the products spin in three dimensions, so customers can see what their options are.
Some designers charge by the page, but Borres said that no longer makes sense, because even one page can be elaborate.
A simple site like the Port Authority's starts at $2,000 to $3,000, Borres said, while a more elaborate set-up can cost up to $20,000. The level of interactivity, such as if a customer can use a site to pay a bill or buy a product, also drives costs. "It all depends on how much security you want to have," Graser said.
According to Borres, "What we're finding is most people are driven by budgets," and need sites that have a value to the business.
It's been in the last five years or so that businesses are seeing a real value in their Web sites, said Borres, while Graser credited the boom in faster Internet technologies.
As the technology grows, so will the uses, they said.
While today customers can print movie tickets at home, in a few years, Web sites will have to adjust to rampant cell-phone viewing. That won't catch on, however, until the technology gets cheaper, Graser said.
You Got Web hopes to grow along with the technology.
Their ideal client, Borres said, is a business that is too small to have its own information technology person, but too big not to have a functional Web site.
In addition to some business clients, Borres and Graser said they are gaining experience through designing municipal sites, like that of the Bridgeport Public Library, which is still in the works. They are also getting work updating existing Web sites. Graser hopes to have a few more people working in-house, so they can bounce ideas off one another. Borres wants to keep their stable of outside vendors, but said that more in-house workers means instant service for clients. He believes that You Got Web's ability to offer digital video, through its sister company, will prove to be a strength as more clients ask for streaming video.
"It's so amazing and so vast that there is no end in site," Borres said of the future of Web sites.
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