Forix

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We manufacture submersible motors and pumps for buildings not connected to the city water system and have to rely on wells to provide irrigation and water supplies. The specific business unit I work for manufactures controls for monitoring the pumping process in order to maximize energy efficiency and water yield.

What is your position?

I'm a product manager in the control division.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Forix?

We needed to have an overhaul to our website. It was important that we build tools for both our sales staff and customers in order to streamline the process of selecting, sizing, and ordering equipment. We had unique challenges due to having three sales channels, each of them with its own identity and processes. We had to find a way of building these tools with different storefronts for each section of activity. Ultimately, we wanted the website to help our business.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

Forix rebuilt our site from the ground up, making a new platform for us based on Magento. They have also developed an app for iOS that gives us control of the back-end for adding products and making changes.

We are considering building the app for other platforms, but we've started in only one area in order to learn the process and get some validation from the market. If it proves to be justified, we'll move on from here. We made sure that the website itself is optimized for any mobile platform, in order to accommodate non-iOS users.

We're not developers ourselves, so we needed a solution that could capture the complexity of our products, including their different descriptions and the variables that go into sizing and selecting, without the need to do actual coding when we add or change an element. Magento lets us do this. We can add images and products, move things, and set up pricing rules for various customers. We have a business-to-business environment, so different customers will have different pricing structures. This was an important element for us. Our model is more complex than a retail outlet.

In the past, we had this ability to a limited extent. We sold a few products online, but the site was more of an information portal for products. The new site was a step toward full online ordering. We're not quite there yet, which is more of a limitation on our end, not of the Magento platform itself. We will be undergoing a full enterprise resource planning update, and didn't want to tie functionalities to our current system, only to change them after a year. The new website has full order processing capabilities, but we still use our staff for this task.

The purpose of the iOS app was to support our sales reps. They're constantly visiting customers and contractors, so it becomes a way for them to have access to the full set of tools remotely. They can get product information and size, build quotes and generate submissions. Those submissions act as a snapshot of an entire order, which our engineers can look over and assess the requirements for a project. It helps reduce sale time and back-and-forth activity.

We collaborated primarily with the UX [user experience] developers and project managers, who acted as intermediaries between us and their coding team.

How did you come to work with Forix?

We initially talked to four or five local app and web developers. We met with each one face to face and discussed our requirements. Forix seemed to best align with our goal, namely of building tools to support our business. There are many companies doing interesting work in terms of graphics and content, but they don't offer very robust back-end solutions.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

So far, we've invested close to $200,000 in project work. This includes the work we've made for the first project, and two others that are underway.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We're only now starting to measure the results of our system. The site was launched during the holiday period, and we're turning on features gradually. It will be up and running fully within the next two months.

The initial response has been great, but not data-driven. We're getting general feedback on its general look and feel, which are greatly improved from before.

We plan to track actual user activity as quotes and statistics, and this will be the true reflection of its value: the site's effect to the bottom line.

How did Forix perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a positive experience, which is confirmed by the fact that we have started two other projects with them. Forix has been very easy to work with and also very flexible. Parts of the process have been new to us, and we've tried to understand them. Forix helped guide us through it and has even split development costs on features that we hadn't considered in the initial planning phase.

They've been great as far as being on time and within budget. On any big IT [information technology] project, time and money are the two factors that people look at in terms of performance.

The people with whom we work day to day are easy to reach and communicate well. We can't ask for more than that. We use Basecamp for keeping track of the project.

What distinguishes Forix from other providers?

Their team feels like an extension of our company. They're comfortable to work with and communicate well. From my limited experience, this is what separates Forix from other companies.

Is there anything Forix could have improved or done differently?

Because the process is relatively new to us, there have been a few things early in the scoping process that we didn't think to nail down, and which affected things later on in the project. Forix could offer a little more hand holding for newbie's like us, which would help avoiding circumstances like splitting costs on certain features. Forix handled the situation well, so I couldn't say anything specifically bad about them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a manufacturer based in Oregon. We manufacture accessories for the firearms industry. We make scope mounts. You've got a long-range, high-powered rifle and you've got a scope, and we make the mount that will integrate the two together. We build all of that in-house.

What is your position?

I am the director of marketing and customer service.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Forix?

It's a reasonably technical field, and there are many different fits for scope mounts. I'll just compare it to buying a battery for your vehicle or a starter for your vehicle. A very particular mount will fit a very particular firearm and scope combination, and we were addressing all of those custom requests and technical information by telephone call to the office here. We were trying to create a website that would offer the end user more self-help, so they could find the specific parts that they need for their own practical application without having to call in constantly.

Our previous website displayed items down to a family product level, and now it got down to a SKU [stockkeeping unit] or UPC [universal product code] product level. We've got 650 SKUs on the website that a user can find through a scope-mount selector that Forix designed for us. You can make a choice like, "I have XYZ brand, ABC model," and the tool will kick back all of the components that would fit your scenario. Reducing the phone call rate was a big thing for us, and just offering more information and brand awareness on the website.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in more detail.

When we first met with Forix, we met with an account manager and he gave us some information and said, "Yes, we can do pretty much anything." From there, we kind of put together what we wanted the website to do, as far as reduce phone calls, educate our customers, and allow them to select from a wide range of options. Then, we met with two designers from Forix. We like to buy local. They happened to be in Portland. We're in the Portland area, too, and it's important for us to deal with local businesses.

We met with their designers. They came back a week later. They took what we liked in other websites and what we wanted to do, and literally presented us a PDF version of what our website would look like. Their first concept was just spot on, it was exactly what we were looking for. Clean lines, easy to navigate, and we've already received great feedback from our customers that also love our website.

How did you come to work with Forix?

I did a little bit of website Googling. Our information technology department, which is outsourced through another business, had worked with Forix in the past, and they said, "Hey, you should also talk to this company." We actually had design concepts out to about four or five different companies, and Forix was just very responsive and immediate, and just presented us before we really had a chance to do a lot of analyzing. They were actually able to present what our website could look like, and really none of the other people that we were having the same conversation with brought it to that level.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was about $47,000. It was important for us not to have any movement in that number. It was a pretty significant number for us. We wanted to make sure that we didn't have that creeping up as time went on, when we said, "Hey, how about this? How about that?" They stuck to that quote right through the whole project. We've been online for 27 days with the new site, and we paid exactly what we were quoted.

What is the status of this engagement?

The website went live to the general public on August 4 [2015], and we were in a debugging process probably about the third week of July. We played with it in-house. It's kind of complex. The mount finder system was where we had the most detailed work done, and then truly we also had to supply the content. Rather than taking any of the old site, we opted to introduce all new content on this site, new photos, new text, and new everything. There was nothing that was literally copied and migrated from the old website.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback from this engagement?

I'm not a very technical person, but using Google Analytics as an example, our duration on the site has gone up by about 40 percent, our page views per session have almost doubled, and our bounce rate has gone down about 25 percent – it went from 41 percent to 31 percent. We're almost getting 4,000 more sessions a month  – almost double the time and almost double the amount of pages being viewed on each session. Those are the details I understand, and that's a good thing to me.

How did Forix perform from a project management standpoint?

The only issues probably stemmed from our side because of the learning curve involved with this. They would ask for things, and we just had no idea what they wanted. Their project management team and our project manager used Basecamp, and it work very efficiently. I had never seen or heard of it before, but it worked great and it allowed us to communicate back and forth. Whether I was at home or on my cellphone and they had sent a concern or whether we had submitted files. It worked very well. When we met, we cut a PO [purchase order] very near February 1. At that point, we knew where we will be at X, Y, Z times in the future, and the release was intended to be mid to end of July, and they hit every target spot on.

What distinguishes Forix from other providers?

I've never worked with developers in the past. Our old website was developed in-house using WordPress. We deliberately chose to re-develop our site using WordPress because we can go in and make quick edits on the fly, add products, and different things like that. It's very user-friendly and we didn't want to have to learn how to use a new system.

I would say that it was amazing what two designers in their twenties were able to do in an industry that they don't work in extensively, the firearms industry, to make it so end-user friendly and so specific to our industry in the design aspect. It was refreshing to see a couple younger college graduates come out and design this accessory website for a firearms company. It was pretty cool.

Is there anything Forix could have improved or done differently?

I have to tell you that, at a couple points, we were quickly disappointed in a couple issues when they were initially shown to us. When we pushed back a little bit and said, "Well, this is what we had talked about. This is really what we were hoping for." Within a day, they would have that change made in the system without creeping the price at all. So no, I think if anything they were very quick to respond to anything we asked for.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We wholesale and distribute lighting products, mainly in the category of light therapy. We advocate mainly the light therapy products, which are for the winter seasonal affective disorder. We have a whole product line that can help people to lead a healthier and happier lifestyle in the wintertime when there's not enough lighting. It can also serve as a great extra dose of light for those who work in different shifts, long-distance driving, or in the airline business who have a very strong jet lag across the time zones. We are a very science-based company, and we have cutting-edge products of light therapy for people to use in their house, during their trip, or for their daily work as well.

What is your position?

I am the vice president of marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Forix?

At the time, we had come up with a very novel product, and we needed to showcase the benefits of the unit to the different niche markets. Because it's a lighting product, it has blended the artwork with the light. It's a combination of light and art therapy. At the time, we didn't work well with all the other web designers; we never had a great experience with any of them prior to Forix.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in more detail.

They built a website to help showcase our new product. There were two parts: the design part and the Magento platform setup. They had to do the planning, the development, and the responsive design, which had to do with a lot of applications in Magento, such as the optimal checkout point. We needed to have a gallery, and they had to optimize the gallery input. Then, they did a lot of QA [quality assurance] testing.

We thought that we would be doing a redesign, but actually it was more of a revamping. We had to engage someone that they recommended as our copywriter as well, to update the information. It was almost from scratch because the previous web design was really old-fashioned. It was not even 2.0. We had a lot of trouble with the IP [Internet protocol] address, and we had issues with the security part.

Before the launch, they helped us to do the training so we can also handle basic updates ourselves. It was very successful. From a starting point, when they started to handle the discover page enhancements for the design, they added the animation part, which we provided collateral for, but we needed to have a very interactive, almost like an illustration of the biorhythms, with the changing melatonin and cortisol levels.

Then, we needed to have different color backgrounds because we have different color temperatures throughout the day, so your body will be synchronized with those color temperatures. They had to work on that illustration, and it was a very good design. Then, they also had to implement the gallery section to upload all the images, so the customers can search based on different categories.

The development section was more about data visualization. It was very fluid. We had a contact person who took care of all the details, and it was effortless. We didn't have to kick back and forth like we did with the other web designers. Almost from the beginning, they knew what we needed. They did a lot of studies on our competitors, other industry websites, and they came up with something that was just made for us from the start. It was a very good working relationship.

They did the Magento setup and it was the community version, so the support was included. The website was designed for desktop, and then they made it adaptable to mobile devices like tablets and phones. That is marvelous because we had a couple of areas where the interactive design was difficult to view on the phone at a very fast speed. They figured out how to make it work fluidly.

The e-commerce part, that's a part of the content. They handled the catalog management for us. We don't have a lot of products, but it's very content-rich because we don't only have the products, but also the images that we uploaded. That was very time-consuming, and each of them requiring a specific code, but they did it seamlessly. In terms of the order management, in the beginning they suggested we do a three-step order process, which was very easy for our customers.

They also gave us a lot of training around the core Magento functionalities, where you can bundle the products, you can have different promotions for the trade show. We are planning to have a trade show in March next year, so we are packing up, coming in to the promotion side. We can print out certain codes from Magento, take them to the trade shows and people can buy with discounts. There are a lot of features. It's a big list. The automated email part for shopping – that's pretty straightforward.

The pre-launch phase was very quick, too, after they collected all the development data. We were late about a week after we fixed the launch date.

How did you come to work with Forix?

We were very diligently looking for the right partner in web design, and then we found them. I actually Googled them, and I found their website. I found their portfolio very interesting, and then they sent us a lot of testimonial pieces from their previous clients. We talked to each of them, and this is what convinced us to work with them.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We had a scope in the beginning, and then we did some enhancements. I would say in the ballpark of $50,000 for the whole project.

What is the status of this engagement?

They have done a lot of things for us and recommended a lot of things. We have the whole package: hosting, a good copywriter for the writing part, and we're still working with them for maintenance on a monthly basis. They recommended us a very good marketing team for post-launch.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I think they are a top-notch company in IT [information technology], especially in the design area. It's very innovative. Nicolas [Knight, user experience designer at Forix] was the main guy who was behind the design. There's nothing that we were not happy and satisfied with. We were a 100 percent satisfied with a lot of things that they implemented from the very beginning.

The delivery speed is great. We didn't receive any complaints about that. The page template looks great. We also asked them to create two versions in two different languages. Some of our products are manufactured in China, and we really want to target the Chinese market. We made it in English and Chinese and they just implemented everything effortlessly. Then, there's a shipping part in Magento, where we had to let the customers see the real pricing, in terms of shipping with FedEx, UPS, and SmartPost with the U.S. post office. We gave them all these options, and they implemented them very nicely. It was not a flat rate, they had to be real rates based on the dimensions and weight of each product, and it was really nicely done.

They also added the PayPal integration for payments, for people who would like to use that. Then, they also suggested giving the customer the option to be signed up as a customer or to buy products and checkout as a guest. That was a very nice feature because we saw that a lot of people don't want to sign up. In the past, we had a lot of logging issues with prospects, and they abandoned the cart because of that, it was lacking the element of shopping as a guest.

There was a hacker issue two or three weeks before we launched the website, so we had the website removed from the Google listing for almost a month. The SEO [search engine optimization] part was very damaging for us. Now, we are back, and even better than we were with our previous website. This is how fast it got generated. We launched in June, and we crawled back to the Google listing very quickly, and that was because of their SEO work.

We only had one complaint, with one of the customers saying that he can't view certain things on his computer, but he might a very amateur customer because, on our end, we could order for him easily.

What distinguishes Forix from other providers?

During the whole process, Forix gave us a lot of key recommendations. The other web designers we've had, they would just sit down and do whatever we told them to do, but we are not experts in web design. We know our products, we are product experts, but we need our web designers to give us feedback, and that's what Forix gave us. They told us what's good, what's not good. Before the launch, they gave us a lot of time to improve certain areas that were incomplete, which was great. They worked to adjust that with us and gave us recommendations.

Is there anything Forix could have improved or done differently?

They are very responsive. During the whole project, the redesign phase, we had no complaints. The contact person, Jesse, was very diligently trying to meet our schedule and timeline. At one point, because the images we uploaded were so many, he was like, "We might want to do this after we launch, during the maintenance phase." That's when I had to nudge him a little bit and say, "Hey, Jesse, we want this done." That was the only time I had to persuade him to do what we wanted to do, but it was almost out of scope too, I admit.

Post-launching, the maintenance part, I feel like they need to stay with the same contact person. The team is still very responsive, they always have a ticket open and they will work with that, but they will never call us. We always have to call them. They consider the maintenance part a little less important. Maybe the core staff focuses on other main projects. I do think that they should still have the previous contact person continue with the maintenance phase. I don't know how he could handle all these things, but I would still want to keep him because he's the one who knows everything about our project.

Maintenance-wise, it's still very important to keep everybody in the loop so that we don't have to change the contact person after the project is done because we're still working with them – they're still our web designers. It's not a big deal, but to be the very best, award-winning designers, I think they should have one contact person all the way.

With the maintenance guys – Andrew and Corey – I have to go back and forth, explain them what we did, and they always ask us to approve. I feel it's not as close as we did with Jesse because he really got involved. The involvement part, after the project has been launched, I believe that is the main thing. If they can afford to do this, that would be good.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We manufacture and sell, through our website, portable office products – mostly room dividers, privacy screens, and folding walls. We have a wide variety of products. Most of our clients are schools, offices, and churches – mostly business-to-business – but we do have some products that are popular with consumers like outdoor screens and things like that for backyards. We used to have five sites that were devoted to our different product lines.

One of the points of our rebranding was to focus more on our corporate name and have one corporate site that had everything on it versus five sites. The URLs were a little more keyword-centric, and even though they helped us with our ranking, we wanted to come across to people as more of a professional company. Forix helped us redirect those sites into a brand new site that looks and functions much better. At the same time, we did a light rebranding, with a new logo – a basic new look for our company. We didn't really go overboard with new marketing, but we're slowly doing that as we progress.

What is your position?

I'm the digital marketing director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Forix?

We wanted a new site. We wanted a responsive site, one that looked modern and clean. Our biggest competitor created a new site, and we wanted to keep up with them. Additionally, none of us were really happy with the look of our site since it had been pretty old, and it looked outdated. We wanted something that not only looked good, but just functioned better, gave people more customizations and options to find exactly what they're looking for.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in more detail.

There are a lot of new features on the new site. The whole site is about filtering, which is kind of common on those sites, but it's new to us. Having that little sidebar on the left where someone can choose if they want a particular style, material, or color, to have the results narrow automatically by just clicking a button makes it easy for our customers.

There's actually a particular thing that Forix thought of, that we did not think of, and that was the little partition selector feature, where questions come up. For someone new to the site, they may not even know what they're looking at. It just asks them four or five questions, and after those questions are answered, it presents them with the exact range that they would be looking for. That was kind of nice.

How did you come to work with Forix?

We got a few quotes from different companies spread across America, and Forix was at the higher end of our quotes, but I was definitely gunning for them and, luckily, I was able to convince my boss that they were the right choice. By far, they had the best designers working for them, and that was enough to make me definitely want to invest in them.

In our original search, Forix was really appealing to us because they were Magento certified. We used Magento for our shopping software. Out of the three that we narrowed it down to, I think they were the only ones who actually had the Magento certification. That was another reason to pay a little more for their service. Like I said, I would definitely do it again.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was between $70,000 and $80,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The site was completed about a month and a half ago. I was used to working directly on Basecamp with our previous rep, and we moved to now using the standard support help desk where we have a rep assigned to us. We just file a ticket now when we have problems. It's going to be an ongoing relationship. In our contract, we have an allotted five or six hours a month, and we plan on using them. We actually don't have a back-end developer in-house at the moment, so we're going to be relying on Forix for continued maintenance and support.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Unfortunately, I don't have any crazy numbers. It wasn't the kind of thing where we put a new site and then just watch it work because we were doing other things like rebranding and redirecting the old sites. I don't have any particular numbers to throw out. The one that does stick out though is that our e-commerce conversion rate has gone up. We're definitely in the right position. I think the change is going to be a little more gradual there.

We have received a lot of positive feedback from our customers, both to the salespeople and through our little site survey. People find it easier to use the site. We have received a lot of compliments about the look of the site, our new logo, and stuff like that.

How did Forix perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a few little problems during the development phase. However, if something slipped under their radar and I noticed it, and they were very quick to fix it. There was never a problem they couldn't solve, even if it took them a little longer. I consider myself a bit more of a demanding client, and they were totally cool about everything. I can't say enough good things about working with Chris [Baily] and Danica [Hutton].

What distinguishes Forix from other providers?

Nothing that I can think of. To be honest, this is the only time I've ever done this. I've never remodeled a whole site before with another company, so this was a bit of a new experience for me. Maybe because my expectations were low, I was totally blown away by how quickly Forix was able to fix stuff.

Like I said, Danica was just on top of things through Basecamp, which was we did most of our communication. I was never left in the dark with anything. Our previous site's developer, we wanted to get away from him because he outsourced his development work to someone in Vietnam, so changes could only happen at night. There were a lot of annoying things like that. I was happy to go from that to working with Forix, a professional company.

BACKGROUND

Please give a little bit of background on your company and what you do there.

We’re True Me Brands. We’re comprised of two companies: True Nopal cactus water and OrganicMe functional beverages. We manufacture healthy, nutritious, organic beverages.

What is your role at the company?

I’m one of the four owners. My role is the chief operations officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was the business challenge that you were trying to address when you approached Forix Solutions?

We had been using a foreign developer to work on the website. We were trying to save a little money at the beginning, and it really didn’t turn out how we wanted it to. So, I was looking for a domestic developer to improve upon things and give us something a little more artistic and something that resonated with our customers.

Was that for all of your websites, just for the OrganicMe website?

It was for OrganicMe.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their work?

They pretty much molded it from the ground up. That really coincided with what our vision was. They really didn’t use any of the old material at all.

How long did that project take?

I think it was completed in about eight weeks.

We started discussing some time towards the end of July [of 2013]. I think we got started on the site in August. I believe we were done with it around the first week of October [of 2013]. 

Why did you select them with which to work?

Honestly, just the customer service. They really went through all the steps to make sure they understood the project. They’ve had the best follow-up by far. They were on the phone with me multiple times just making sure that they really understood the project. I’d seen some of their website work [that they’d completed in the past] and was pretty impressed with it.

Can you give a sense of the size of the project with either a cost range or a personnel work hour figure?

It was in the $10,000 to $15,000 range. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of the results, are there any metrics or user feedback that you can share that indicates the effectiveness of the work?

We were nominated for a couple of awards at different expos just based on our digital content for artistic appeal. That was the first feedback we got when we launched it was we had an award at Expo West. We’ve definitely had a couple of people ask us who did our site and asked for references for Forix to do their additional sites, and some of our customers or suppliers have inquired on who did our site. They were just impressed with the overall outcome.

Are you happy with the results?

Yeah, absolutely. They pretty much nailed it on the first iteration in the very beginning of design phase. Their early concept matched our vision almost perfectly. We wanted to make it really clean, organic, something that resonated with that organic natural consumer base, and they just nailed it.

How would you describe their performance?

They’re great. I had a good personal relationship with a couple of the guys, and both were very professional. Follow up is great. They followed up several times after the completion of the project, too, just to make sure I was happy with everything, if there was anything that needed changes. I usually hear from them at least once a month still.

Is there anything else that’s unique or special about them compared to other companies that you may have worked with?

My undergrad was in computer science. I’ve worked with a lot of different firms over the years. Honestly, I think they are a cut above the rest. It’s really the best firm I’ve ever worked with. We were so impressed.

Is there any area that you think that they could improve on, or that you would do differently looking back?

Honestly, no. Their processes are great. We go through the art stage. They make sure they understand everything. They did a couple of wireframes for me to make sure we were on point. Their process worked really well. I really don’t have a single complaint.

BACKGROUND

Could you provide a brief description of your company?

We are a toxicant-free cosmetic company. We are here in the San Francisco Bay area, which is located very close to Marin County where the incidents of breast cancer have risen up by about 60 percent. We do a lot of work with breast cancer organizations and women who are searching for cosmetics that don’t have any synthetic chemicals, that are made with the purest ingredients possible and ingredients that not currently linked to scholarship suggesting there is a correlation between those chemicals and breast cancer. Our work predominantly revolves around holistic cosmetics.

What’s your role with the company?

I’m the administrative assistant.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenge that you were trying to address?

We needed to find a company that wasn’t going to try to railroad us into putting sexy-looking models on a front page when about 90 percent of our customers have no hair because of chemotherapy. We also were looking for a Web design company that understood that we’re not big into marketing. We’re not big into pressuring people for sales. It’s a weird dynamic, but we’re more of a cosmetic/charitable organization. This particular job required a very in-depth, detailed understanding of what we were doing. We were scared, because basically, we had been reeling from bad experiences with other Web designers here in the Silicon Valley. 

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of the project?

We had a very specific idea in mind of how we wanted it to look, as our company is much different from other cosmetic companies. Forix was able not only to incorporate our original ideas, but they effectively built upon and enhanced our vision. It was also really neat for us because we did not have countless revisions — because they understood the vision from the outset. If they had any questions, they asked and we worked together efficiently to clarify issues from the start. They have a proficient system for changes that incorporates an Excel spreadsheet, so that, when you want a change, you enter it on the spreadsheet, and it keeps everything tidy and clear.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms or work-hour figure?

We paid a total of $30,000. There were no extra charges. With Forix, what you see is what you get. They say what they’re going to do and they do it. I sing their praises, because we almost went out of business if we didn’t find Forix. It was getting that bad. We were getting hacked. We just couldn’t get cooperation from the other web developers. We just had a horrible experience and Forix put that all to rest for us. They are outstanding. Not only are they outstanding, they’re honorable, which is something that I hold in really high esteem.

When was the website project started and completed?

We started in June of 2013 and we launched January 7 of 2014.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve delivered?

We are proud to stay that our website accurately reflects our company mission and we give all the credit to Forix for that. At the time of our website launch, which can be stressful, Forix put up their entire staff to ensure that it was seamless and smooth. Although some bumps in the road are inevitable, Forix took care of making sure they were appropriately handled.

When working with them, is there anything you’d consider unique or special about them that distinguishes them from other vendors you’ve used?

The people at Forix are really sharp. They know all the newfangled stuff. For me, I didn’t know much about this newfangled stuff. They were able to come up with this automated, how to choose a color thing. Now it’s real neat. If you go to our website, ladies can go and can put their skin tone in, they push a button and then two choices automatically pops up. You can’t believe what a change this has been for me personally. They threw that in extra. It wasn’t really, technically under the contract, but they did it.

We developed a real good relationship with them so much so that we’ve hired them on as our extension to our IT [information technology] department. If we have IT related tasks, they just do them. They have a neat system, too. If you want to keep things organized like me, they have this Excel spreadsheet, which is really a good way to go. You see something you don’t like on the site, you type it into the Excel spreadsheet, you email it to them, they note it, they tell the developers, and they return it back to you and tell you it’s done. It keeps everything nice and neat. This is a really nice system they have. They’re also really personal. They’re really warm about that. They allow for human interaction.

Is there any area on which that they could improve?

No. They were fantastic. I can’t think of anything where they couldn’t do. There was nothing they could have done to improve what they did. They were outstanding. They were so detailed, so honorable, so well versed in what they’re doing, so trustworthy. It’s unbelievable. They’re almost too good to be true, but they continue to perform, and to this day, they are really our partners. I look to Forix as part of Coastal Classic Creations, not somebody we hired to do a job.