Websoul – Custom Web Design “Challenge Seekers”

March 16th, 2011 by Brennan Knotts. Posted in Custom Web Design, SEM, SEO, Social Media, Template-based, Web Applications

Today’s interview is with Juan Carlos Carrillo, the President of Websoul a custom web design, application development, and web marketing firm. Read below as he discusses the most challenging aspect of designing a website as well as one of the most complex websites his firm has developed.

1. What makes your web design firm unique?

Juan Carlos: Websoul is a Web Design & Marketing company that offers affordable Custom Web Designs and Web Marketing campaigns. What makes us unique is the fact that we are not just web designers, our team represents several different backgrounds. We have Software Architects, System Engineers, Usability Engineers, Creative Artists, and Technical Writers to name a few. Because of such diversity, our clients benefit from working with such knowledgeable and experienced professionals.

2. What advice would you give to someone trying to hire a web design firm?

Juan Carlos: It is not hard to understand what a website should do. What is challenging is to understand the client’s vision and goals. Someone looking to hire a web design firm should look for a company that understands the client’s audience, has some background in the client’s industry and has a diverse team of individuals who would be able to design & develop any website regardless of its complexity.

3. What are your thoughts on choosing a template-based website versus a custom website?

Juan Carlos: Template-based websites might be affordable for a web designer but not for anybody else. The time needed to customize the template is not worth the investment, unless you have plenty of free time. But even then, the chances of getting it right are slim. Stand out from the crowd and have a one of a kind website not a knock-off of another one. Add the cost of the template to the time invested on customizing it and its total will be less than what you would have paid for a custom web design.

4. I’ve decided to use your design firm to build my website, what happens next?

Juan Carlos: At Websoul, the information gathering process is key to creating a well designed website. After a client chooses us, we start the information gathering phase to fully understand the client’s vision and goals. Then we go to the design phase, during which we create mock-up web screen shots that go back and forth between the client and our web design team until the right look & feel is created. If an application is being developed, flow, sequence, use case diagrams and more are created to provide the client and our development team with a footprint on how the application will work. Once in the development phase, we bring everything together to create the website/application. When done, our testers begin the testing phase to make sure everything works as expected. After the website/application is tested in our user acceptance environment, it is rolled out to production, either our hosting environment or the client’s hosting environment.

5. What trends are you currently seeing in the projects you’re being asked to do?

Juan Carlos: We are seeing plenty of requests in regards to social media and cloud services. Clients want to integrate with systems such as facebook, twitter, salesforce.com, google apps, etc.

6. Do you recommend social features (e.g. blogs) on a typical website, why or why not?

Juan Carlos: Users are now expecting social features such as news, articles, reviews, blogs from websites. Companies that offer those features will be key players in the near feature. We, at websoul, always recommend these features to our clients.

7. Describe one project you’ve worked on that stands out as one of your favorites.

Juan Carlos: Every project we undertake has its challenges and as “challenge seekers” we like them all. Recently, we finished a Testing Preparation Website on which we used technologies such as web services, ajax and more. The project was challenging due to the complexity of the website. One of the features was “timed exams.” We had to take care of situations where a user could loose internet connectivity, close the browser, etc. and in every case, we had to record how much time the user had left on the exam.