Read More About the Boys & Girls Club of North Valley

Today is a major milestone for me and my company. We’ve now moved on to our fourth major portfolio redesign steaming from 2004 when this business was officially, official. It’s pretty astonishing to see how far we’ve come as a creative firm in such a short period of time. Six years to a large businesses can be just a blip on the radar, but to us it’s a true testament to our team of talented graphic designers, web developers, and network administrators that have lead this business to it’s success over these years.

To say that the landscape of Web Design and Web Development hasn’t changed much, would be a complete fallacy. Six years ago there was one major browser, we all used “tables” to develop our websites, and the world of freemium and dynamic websites was still in it’s infancy. Today we must code for over 6 various web browsers, one line at a time, and dynamic interactive websites are the new black. Gone are the days of throwing together a “simple” 5 page website, and in with the days of “does it work in Internet Explorer 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome”?

Every great design firm must have a web site that showcases their talent and gives potential clients an idea of what they can get by hiring that firm. The challenge is how often we get to do that. In a normal year, we may work on upwards of 75 projects. Having time to update our own website sometimes falls to the back burner and has for almost 3 years. If a design firm has the time to update their website too often, it may make you wonder…”Shouldn’t they be actually working on paying clients”?

Today we launch our fourth major overhaul of Chico Web Design, a business started in a spare bedroom six years ago and today employees seven. We did not take any shortcuts on this website. We are pushing the boundaries with the brand new technology of HTML5 & CSS3. I could get into a lengthy conversation about Transitional HTML5 & CSS3, however we’ll save that for another blog entry, but just know that very few sites have adapted to this technology. If you are using an older browser such as Internet Explorer 6.0 or Firefox 2.0, you will see a degraded version of what more sophisticated web browsers will view. The beauty of Transitional HTML5 is that it gives us the availability to be backwards compatible with all older browsers.

A special thanks to the Chico Web Design family, Sean, Brent, Ben, Ryan, Dennis, and Neil for being apart of all this and to your families as well for letting you work so hard!

Below are the four major website revisions captured. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Woof & Poof offers many products such as Christmas ornaments, holiday decorations, aprons, hot water bottles, clothes, blankets, bibs, collectible bean bags, music dolls, and can be found in over 600 retailers across the country; like Nordstroms. Woof & Poof’s merchandise is handcrafted and made with exceptional quality and care for everyone to enjoy and love. Our boutique style website designed for Woof & Poof was made to catch the attention of their online visitors and to showcase their designs, handcrafted decorations, and gifts that they offer.

Chico Web Design contributed to Woof & Poof’s brand design with our very own label design, which were used on aprons for Nordstroms retail stores. We have the brand design, print experience, and creative expertise to make your product stand out from the rest.

Chico Web Design crafts eye catching product labels that will make customers turn their heads and come back for more. Chico Web Design also worked with their local boutique, Made in Chico, to design new product labels  for a variety of food packaging.  Items such as almonds, jam, and candy all received a new fresh look and packaged feel. Chico Web Design worked closely with Made in Chico to create the label design that best fit their product merchandise.

Chico Web Design offers an assortment of design services including website design, website development, print design, and web hosting for the greater Sacramento area. While companies are marketing their businesses and spending money on traditional advertisements, Sacramento companies can hire Chico Web Design to design a website. theWebsites are the least expensive way to advertise and the easiest way for customers to obtain information about your business.

Chico Web Design can provide custom website designs for Sacramento in the following industries:

• Financial
• Insurance
• Agriculture
• Public safety
• Online retailer
• Music industry
• Boutiques
• Law Firms
• Architecture Firms
• Restaurants
• Construction Firms
• Much, much, more

We work closely with our design clients to get the appearance and functionality that they are looking for, insuring our customer’s satisfaction.

Sacramento Web Development

Chico Web Design has a experienced web development team that can apply your business requirements into a fully automated, easy to use, business solution. We have the advanced tools to help you manage your content, place inventory online, or craft an online retail experience for your customers. We make it easy to promote your business and maintain your website with little to no knowledge of HTML. Our content management tools and custom built framework allows administrators too add content, photo galleries, current news, web blog entries, calendar events, and much more. With the click of a mouse you can log into your secure website tools and change the content from anywhere, on any computer, at anytime.

Sacramento Graphic Design

Chico Web Design has the creativity for your business to give it the edge over your competitors when it comes to print marketing collateral. From logo design to tradeshow booths, we have professional and knowledgeable designers who have experience in designing just about anything. Business cards design, T-shirt design, magazine ads, even custom gift certificates, we will work closely with you and your business to get your ideas and turn them into a reality.

Sacramento Web Hosting

Not only do we offer web design, print design, and web development services, but we also specialize in web hosting in Sacramento. In order for your business website to be seen on the web, the website we create for your business needs to hosted on a web server. Our servers, which are multi-homed, 16 core servers, will make sure that your website loads at lighting speeds. We offer both Linux and Windows based hosting solutions along with shared hosting. Chico Web Design has the capacity to manage dedicated servers as well as co-locate multi-tiered solutions with our data center partners in Sacramento California. We have a full time server manager to proactively maintain all web servers. We also are prepared for anything that happens unexpectedly, so we perform offsite backups on a nightly, weekly, and monthly basis to protect your data.

When asked by the owners of McGrath Woodworks to create a website for their business, Chico Web Design’s creativity kicked into high gear! With no previous website or marketing materials, Chico Web Design started from scratch to create McGrath Woodworks brand and image. From business cards, tradeshow banners and truck magnets, to a fully dynamic website.

McGrath Woodworks needed a solution which allowed them to easily update and maintain their own products. We had the perfection solution for them. With our Mavieo Content Management system, we were able to seamlessly integrate their websites look and feel with a graphical administration interface making uploading products, modifying content, and editing categories a breeze.

Launch McGrath Woodworks

Other Design Items

Supporting the community and shopping local is what Made In Chico is all about. They carry products from local vendors through-out the North Valley and what a pleasure it was to work with the owner Jacki to create a new label designs for their new products.

Made In Chico Products are in Green

Getting well underway to a new Blog for LuLus.com!

Every website that we design at Chico Web Design starts as an idea.  Based on those ideas and client interactions, we put pen to paper and begin creating website design mockups.  Depending on the requirements, a full set of design comps will typically begin with a home page and inner content page.  More advanced web sites introduce member sections, payment details, and can go upwards of a dozen or so independent mockups.

Just as a builder draws blueprints, Chico Web Design creates our own set of blueprints for several reasons.

• It’s cheaper and less laborious to make changes in this phase
• It gives the client an idea of what their site could look like without the investment of full development
• Allows for open collaboration between our creative teams and our clients
• Gives us a venue to express our ideas about your business and site
• Sets the tone for the remainder of the pages