Ruysdael Design

Our Philosophy
At Ruysdael Design, we want to be your partner. We understand that your success on the Web is a key part of your success as a business. To that end, your website is your storefront, and it should be treated with care and thoughtfulness. A good website, like a good storefront, is an integral part of attracting business. At Ruysdael Design, we believe strongly that an effective website is one that is clean, easy to read, dynamic and attractive. We also believe that your continued success is tied to our continued success, and as such, we don’t walk away when the website design is complete. On the contrary, we monitor your site to make sure its content remains current and attractive.

Management
Ruysdael Design is located in Oxnard California. Many tasks are handled by internal personnel; however, we often outsource work to local experts. We believe that only through local supervision can the management team closely monitor progress and ensure the outcome.

Our business philosophy revolves around customer satisfaction through participation. To that end, we keep you in the loop and check with you frequently during the web design process. We explain the complex technical terms in plain English, and we carefully lay out all alternatives before requesting a decision from you. For example, do you need a forum for your site? We understand what forums are and what they can do for you, and more importantly, we know when to use them and when not to use them. We can give you our educated advice on forums and help you decide whether or not you need one.

Additionally, we grow with your site. As your traffic grows, we'll be there to help you expand and offer more services to your subscribers. Perhaps you'd like to add a newsletter, or maybe you'd like to syndicate content from other sites onto your site. (Sports scores or weather, for example.) In any case, we help you monitor your traffic and we'll make suggestions designed to increase your readership and gain popularity.

The management team has many years experience in technology, including engineering work in computer design and software development. We've also held various management jobs in high-tech companies. Most of our experience comes from working in the high-tech industry since the early 1980s. This depth of experience gives us a sense of appreciation for the technology upon which we make a living. We understand the technology and the industry, and we offer our experience for your benefit.

The Tools We use
At Ruysdael Design, we strongly believe in using as many tools as needed to bring forth a great website design. We use the following tools to help us compose our designs:

• Adobe Dreamweaver - An excellent resource for creating HTML and CSS, Dreamweaver cannot be beat. It allows you to edit most of your work in a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG - "Wizzie-Wig") environment.
• Adobe Flash - The Flash player is installed on 98% of computer browsers, and having your own custom animation or interactive application on Flash means that you can reach and impress a large audience. At Ruysdael Design, we create Flash applications and interactive content for your web page. Whether you're trying to dazzle your audience with an animated banner ad or provide an online interactive game, we can help you. We're experts at Flash as well as the ActionScript language.
• Content Management System (CMS) - CMS Packages like Joomla! and WordPress are, for many people, the only way to create dynamic content without having to deal with HTML and CSS. We at Ruysdael Design make heavy use of these CMS packages and train you how to use them. Once we set you up and train you, you can post your own content online without knowing a thing about the underlying engine that powers it all. CMS packages also give you the opportunity to expand them, so you can include things like customer polling, online forums, building a FAQ database and marketing your products with an online catalog. If there are no pre-created expansion packages available for what you need, we'll program them for you.
• Hosting - At Ruysdael Design, we host your site on DreamHost, which uses Linux-based servers running PHP/MySQL. What does this mean to you? We've found that teaming with a world-class hosting service is a key part of implementing the solutions our customers require. There are a lot of hosting services out there, but we've chosen DreamHost because of their dedication to service, their wide assortment of pre-installed software packages and the easy access they provide for customized programming.

Often we find that our list of tools do not directly satisfy our requirements. This is where our programming expertise comes into play. At Ruysdael Design, we maintain deep knowledge in every aspect of website design. We draw upon a team of expert programmers that aren't afraid to deep-dive into the technology to give life to your requirements.

Our Motivation
We like websites. Period. We like to design them to be functional and useful, but we never forget that a website ultimately serves an audience. Whether your audience consists of casual readers or serious business users, the Ruysdael Design team is ready to help.

Give us a call and put us to work for you. We promise to do our best to delight you with a great website!