Paul Ferrier, Co-Founder
We’re not the least expensive web development company around. Our clients pay us to produce high quality websites. Most of the companies we work with have limited budgets for website development and marketing. We find clients invest well to produce a high quality, user-friendly website, but the annual budget is consumed by development. So the site exists on the web with little to no web marketing support.
After 400+ developments, we know the clients who are raking in the benefits of the web are also marketing on the web. A great website + great web marketing = success.
Our goal is to produce ROI (Return On Investment) for our clients. That is the belief Mindscape was founded upon, net results. So we asked ourselves, “How can we deliver a superior website and superior web marketing all at a reasonable cost that works with our client’s budgets?”
We can only do this by making our development process more efficient. BUT the site must maintain our high standard of quality, usability, and search engine friendliness.
After a year of development, we’re happy to announce the launch of our Managed Web Marketing Environment.
A Managed Web Marketing Environment is a community-centric approach to website development and management for our clients. The MWME is more than content management. It’s more than marketing. It’s more than you will commonly get with any stand alone website. It’s managed. It’s always current. It’s always evolving. It’s more efficient. It’s NOT a template system.
The MWME is an incredibly robust code base that is shared among a group of organizations. All of the MWME’s tools (such as blogs, custom forms, news listings and image galleries) are available at the click of a button. The environment is continually updated to incorporate new standards, new functionality and new web services.
Our clients will benefit from one another by sharing features and development costs. By reducing the cost of web development, budget resources can be allocated to web marketing. What does that mean for you? Faster return on your investment, a very important element with today’s economy.
Everyone knows two brains are better than one. So why not assign that philosophy to your website? In the sense we’re talking, it’s more like, “Would 100 websites working together help me more than if I were alone?” The answer is, yes.
All developments are still custom, but when new features are developed, they can be shared with all sites using the MWME.
If you need a custom tool that is proprietary to your business, it can remain private and closed off to the network. But in general, it is to everyone’s benefit to share.
Amazingly, we’re on the web a lot. Chances are pretty good that we’re on the web even more often than you. The point? Well, we’re on top of emerging trends and technology. Imagine its 1999 and people are talking about this new marketing technique called “blogging”. We pay close attention and add this feature into our environment before most clients even know what it is. This is how we keep your site up to date with the latest trends of web marketing. With the MWME, as new technologies develop, they’ll become available for your site affordably, and at the click of a button.
Like everything, a website has a life cycle. In most cases, a website is considered out of date if it’s design is more than 3 years old. Depending on your market, if all the content on the site remains the same for even one month, it’s considered out of date. At the point it’s out of date, your website can easily become a negative brand value. Meaning it starts to work against you. If your competition looks great and up to date with their website, and you look old, this could negatively impact their impression of your company. And worse yet, cost you the sale or relationship.
Budgeting for a website the old way can be difficult because technology and web marketing trends are constantly evolving (fast). With our new development model, you can more easily budget your web investment.
With our new development model, you pay for your custom design and implementation into the new environment. The MWME requires less coding, resulting in a LOWER DEVELOPMENT COST. With this approach, you’ll enjoy a site with a continually expanding feature set, at a reasonable, fixed cost that’s easy to budget.
You won’t pay for upgrades for your tools UNLESS you need functionality that is not built in the system and requires custom programming (such as a proprietary tool to access your internal databases). The only other time the system will cost you more is if we update the design for you.
It’s really quite simple and will benefit everyone. The power is in the number of clients taking advantage of our environment. Each client contributing a small monthly fee will give us the ability to focus on developing the best tools for the market. With this business model, we’re no longer constrained by hours. Instead of having 10 hours to develop a photo gallery for one client, we can invest 100 hours to make the best possible gallery and make it available for all our clients. We call this approach “Shared Development.” The quality of our web developments will continue to increase, while the price goes down. And it’s all because of the environment we build together.