Who are we?

TeamLaLaLa is a group of professionals who enjoy working together. Our skills include several years of photography, electronic music creation, computer programming, graphic arts, Flash animation, writing, sketching, and web design. We are a group of people with many vocations and avocations. We combine these skills to create for you the mix of media, text and programming that you need to promote your ideas and your products.

We've worked on sites as diverse as

You can learn more about us on the personal pages we maintain on this site. Check out what Laura, Lawrence and Lark have put on this site.

What can we do for you?

How much do websites cost?

Websites vary greatly in price. You might simply be launching a small online magazine, and your goals can be accomplished using, for the most part, standard software with some custom graphic design. This might only cost $3,000. Then again, perhaps you are imagining a news site with a staff of 20. Then you might need custom software that keeps track of who is working when, and what permissions each of them have to alter a particular file or piece of information. You might need a file management system, and online image editing, and graphical newsletters for mass email, and also a system that allows any change to be reverted to its previous state. A large site with a lot of custom software might cost $30,000.

Expensive websites entail financial risk

To build a website entails a certain amount of financial risk. Either the client must bear that risk, or the web design company must bear that risk, or the risk must be shared. In the past, it was common for web design firms to bill clients on an hourly basis. This shifted much of the risk onto the client and usually left all parties feeling disappointed. With hourly billing, if a web design firm finished a site with unusual speed, it was punished by being paid less than what they might have originally estimated, whereas if the project took longer than expected, the client was punished by paying more than what had been originally estimated. No one was happy. For this reason, in recent years, most web design firms have switched to setting a flat rate for projects. This leads to win-win situations: if the web design firm gets done with unusual speed, their profit margin is boosted, whereas if the project goes over the estimated time, the client is protected from extra expense. Thus, all of our projects are done to a fixed rate.

Fixed rate projects transfer most of the financial risk of a project onto the web design firm. If the project takes longer than what we estimated, we pay for the extra time ourselves. For this reason, it is important that we work out accurate estimates. While we are glad to protect our clients from unexpected expenses, we expect, in return, that our clients will work with us to figure out, ahead of time, the details which the work will entail. Luckily we've been working on the web since 1999, and our experience helps us give our clients an accurate sense of how much time a project will take. The advice that Jennifer Greene gave to project managers, regarding how they should manage their bosses expectations, applies here as well:

Estimates have a tendency to be more accurate when they’re based on experience. Having actual data on your past projects is so important when you sit down to figure out how long it’s going to take you to do a new one. The best estimates come from people who really understand the work that’s going to get done. And practices for estimation that stay grounded in project experience are less likely to be wrong. That’s why your project will probably be really late if you just cave in and start shaving off time arbitrarily. It might not be easy, but you need to explain the reasoning behind the estimates your team has come up with and set your boss’s expectations realistically.

Websites have a design phase and a build phase

All web sites need to be designed and built. Some companies try to save time by doing the designing and the building at the same time, but what then happens when a design is changed after the build-out has started? Then all the work that went into building that design is wasted. When builders start writing code before a design has been finalized, the risk that the project will go over-budget and over-time increases, sometimes catastrophically so.

When you, the client, are first considering a project, you are probably unsure how you want your website to look. You may have worked out the business case in great detail, but you don't have any visuals. Or you have visuals from various print products, but those visuals need to be re-purposed to work correctly with the web browsers that your online audience will be using. Or you already have some online visuals, but nothing that's been pulled together into a coherent design.

After you begin talking to us, your ideas about your website may begin to evolve. We might even open your eyes to possibilities you had not considered. New information can lead to new considerations regarding your project, and this evolution of thought is natural and healthy. What would be unhealthy would be to move forward to building out a design when your thoughts have not yet crystalized around the ideal expression of your online needs. For this reason, we separate the design phase from the build phase.

We manage risk by separating the phases

First, we work out the design of the site. We talk with you about what you need, and we generate mock-ups of each section of your site. Visuals make clear what you want and, just as importantly, make clear that we've understood what you want. If we are failing to understand what you want, that will quickly become apparent in the visuals that we generate for you. Visuals help avoid the wasted time (and money) that arises when people try to explain what they want using only text. Long documents full of descriptive text rarely possess the immediate clarity of graphic design. It's a sad fact that the computer industry is rife with people who think it's efficient to work from descriptive documents - documents that are usually refererd to as "functional specs". These documents are meant to specify what functions you, the client, actually want, but they obscure as much as they clarify. Jason Fried of 37 Signals does a good job of explaining why functional specs are so bad:
Functional specifications documents lead to an illusion of agreement. A bunch of people agreeing on paragraphs of text is not real agreement. Everyone is reading the same thing, but they’re often thinking something different. This inevitably comes out in the future when it’s too late. “Wait, that’s not what I had in mind…” “Huh? That’s not how we described it.” “Yes it was and we all agreed on it — you even signed off on it.” You know the drill. Functional specifications document are “yes documents.” They’re political. They’re all about getting to “yes” and we think the goal up front should be getting to “no.” Functional specs lead to scope creep from the very start. There’s very little cost in saying “yeah, ok, let’s add that” to a Word document.
For this reason, we turn your ideas into visuals. Once we know what your site should look like, then we know what to build.

How much does the design phase cost?

The design phase is difficult for us to estimate, since saying "yes" to a design is something only a client can do. We have dealt with a business that had an 11 person committee vote on our designs - it was difficult to get to "yes" because every person on the committee had veto power over the design. For that business, we went through 32 variations before the committee reached concensus. We don't think this is healthy for you, the client.

With design, we find it's best simply to set a deadline and budget - such constraints help to force an agreement and limits the possibility of an endless series of revisions. Creativity loves constraints, and constraints of budget are an excellent source of motivation for agreeing on a design.

On a very rough level, you can expect each section of your site will cost something close to $2,000 to design. If you'd like to contact us with the specifics of what you want, we can offer you a more specific estimate.

But are we the right team to build your website?

The build phase is its own project, with its own estimates and its own written agreement. The advantage of this, for you, is that you can take the project somewhere else if you think another company would do the job better. You may simply want our help coming up with a design - and that's fine with us. Perhaps, if your site is simple HTML, you'd rather get a company that specializes in writing HTML to do the work. Or perhaps your company has an in-house team that can write the HTML for you. Or perhaps you've a friend who owes you a favor. We're comfortable with you taking our designs to another company. But, of course, if you decide to hire us for the build phase, we've the advantage of already having worked with you on the design phase. You won't have to waste time explaining the project all over again.

How much does the build phase cost?

Websites vary so much that it is impossible to give a general answer about their cost. What is certain is that once the design phase is done, we can give you an accurate estimate about how much the build phase will cost. At that point you can, and should, go seek quotes from other web design firms. If, after researching other firms, you decide you'd like to hire us to move forward with the build phase, we will be happy to work with you to create a website that realizes the full potential of your ideas.

But what about unforeseeable changes?

No matter how carefully we try to foresee all the goals which the website is expected to meet, things change. Perhaps your organization is somewhat large, in which case it is natural that with time some people will leave and others will be hired. The new people may see envision new goals for the website. Even if you are single individual, your own goals for the website may change.

We are happy to adapt to the changing goals of the website. However, for every requested change, we follow the same process which we've outlined above: first a design phase, then a build phase. In other words, every change is treated as its own mini-project, with its own estimates and deadlines.

We believe in designer-lead projects

Some web design companies have project managers that stay in touch with their clients for the duration of a project. Other companies leave it to the salesperson who closed the deal. Other companies have computer programmers who oversee the project and manage the client relationship, others leave it to a tech support team, others simply have secretaries who manage the job.

We believe the best results come from putting desigers in charge of projects. For the designer to turn your ideas into visuals, the designer must understand your ideas fully, and therefore the designer is the appropriate person to oversee completion of your project. If the designer is to successfully translate your ideas into a website, then the designer must spend more time talking to you than anyone else, so why should anyone else be in charge of the project? All the other staff at TeamLaLaLa (computer programmers and secrataries) are merely support staff for the designers. The designers run the show, because they understand the your ideas best.

We look forward to transforming your ideas into a website.