It started as a challenge, not a business plan.
Rob had a buddy who had a business, but not a website. Being a friend and all, Rob wanted to build him a website. The problem was not spending too much time doing a "preferential pricing" project, but still meeting the tight standards we have for our work:
- Usability: Our websites are highly usable. When possible, we prefer to do real-world testing prior to launch.
- Accessible: Our websites are designed to be used by everyone, regardless of physical challenges.
- Standards compliant: Our websites follow international standards for the technologies we use, like HTML and CSS.
- Maintainable: We use tools that make it as easy as possible for our customers to own their own sites, including the ability to modify the sites without learning how to program for the web.
- Transportable: We want to meet all of these standards without "vendor lock-in", so our customers can freely choose to work with us or other companies they choose.
It was a bit challenging, coming up with a way to pull all of that together into a site that didn't cost the buddy much money or Rob a lot of time. With some careful consideration and planning, we figured out a way to pull it off. We call it the One Day Starter Site, and once we'd done it a few times we turned it into a service we'd love to offer you.
Check out What you get and How it works for all the gory details.
But it makes a pretty good business plan too.
There are actually quite a few companies offering "one day websites". We know; we looked, just to make sure what we wanted to offer was (1) different and (2) better.
We could spend paragraphs and paragraphs talking about the differences, but lists are more readable:
- You won't get it tomorrow. We schedule a day that lets you prepare.
- We almost always come to you, and do the work in your space where you can be involved.
- People read differently online. We write your copy so that your visitors are most likely to read it.
- You get a real content manager, not a blog.
- Usability, accessibility, and standards are priorities for us.
- You own your site. We make sure you have freedom to choose to work with us the next time.
The price looks like a deal, but we're not actually cheap. We charge you enough to deliver quality. We're going to do about 8 hours of work on your site on production day, plus host your site for a year and provide security updates for the cost of a One Day Starter Site. It works out to a fair wage for a valuable service, which keeps us all in business.
We do more than One Day Starter Sites.
OneDayStarterSite.com is a website promoting a service. It's not the whole company. Our company is Quintessential Mischief LLC, and we provide website and web application development, web site maintenance, social media and network development, newsletters, training, and technical support to companies and organizations. (We offer all of these services to our One Day Starter Site customers, too. See our Options page for details and pricing.) We're in the near south side of Milwaukee and most of our customers are in Southeastern Wisconsin, but we've done work customers from coast to coast, even a couple outside of the US.
