How We Work

We understand people's past experiences vary wildly, so this is our "general gist" document to outline our general processes and make sure everyone is on the same page. You'll notice communication is a huge priority to us! Most issues stem from unclear expectations and lack of structure - things that are irregardless of the work quality itself - and we want every project to be a great experience for you and us.

Working Hours

Our standard business hours are Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. Don't be surprised by emails outside these times! We're one of those 'trendy companies' that works here there and everywhere.  Aka: we're always working :)

Communication Methods

Email is the main tool for communication. For scoping a project or similar things best discussed in real-time we'll schedule a phone call, and for project feedback we use Bugherd or similar tool depending on client preferences to log the items and see the status.

We often don't answer the phone or use 'real-time' communication such as Skype as it's distracting. We've tried multi-tasking and you simply can't focus on developing a site if you're stopping every 10 minutes to reply to an email or chat messages.

Our team@ email goes to multiple staff and is always the best port of call for any urgent items. A phone call only goes to Matt and is no good if overseas (timezones), after hours, not near the phone, on another call etc. It may seem counter-intuitive, we assure you we're far more responsive on email! Every email sends an instant notification to our phones so it's the same as getting a text message or a call.

Quoting Structure

We endeavour to provide fixed price quotes wherever possible. 

Where it's not possible to provide a fixed price quote due to the nature of the project being too hard to quantify the effort involved - for example: my site was hacked and there's things broken everywhere - we will instead estimate and bill half day or full day blocks.

Please note that we don't work hourly. 60% of the time this fails every time, it's science. For ongoing retainer style work we group tasks and do them in minimum half day blocks.

The simplest example is a hairdresser vs a barber. Similar business however they work off different models.

Payment Structure and Methods

PSD to WordPress

- 50% deposit
- 50% on development completion at agreed time

Development Tasks

- 100% upfront before commencing each stage. For larger projects we break them into stages of $1000-2000 so that we're moving in an organised fashion.

Payment methods are bank transfer (preferred) or credit card payment via Stripe.

Rush Work

Projects that involve working:
- On a weekend
- Outside business hours
- On holidays. For 2018 our closing times are 5th April to 13th April, and from 21st December to 7th January 2019

Will be billed at double rate with a minimum charge of $150 AUD plus GST if applicable.
Although we are as flexible as we can be, naturally we can't guarantee availability after hours.

Work done outside of business hours on our own accord is not subject to any increase.

Minimum Charge

Our current minimum charge is $75 AUD, plus GST if applicable. This is to cover the time spent on all aspects of delivering quality work: 
- Doing the update
- Making any relevant backups
- Testing on browsers and devices
- Communication and QA
- Accounting

A common misconception in the industry is  “this will only take 5 minutes”. Our time tracking has shown for simple tasks it will take around 30 minutes of total time for the simplest of tasks. This time is relatively fixed, so 90 mins of development is expected to take around 2 hours overall; and three sets of 30 min development tasks will be towards 3 hours total, as it’s 3x logging in, 3x backups, 3x testing, 3x emails… a lot of repetition.

This is why it’s most efficient to group updates into batches, rather than send little bits. Rather than update one specific item it can be worth updating WordPress + plugins and changing some other niggling things at the same time.

Refund Policy

We provide a statement of work which is quoted against. We understand the hesitancy there may be around paying upfront for work. Should we not do the agreed work, naturally we'll provide a refund. This doesn't happen however - we ensure to only take on projects we know we can complete, set realistic timeframes, and define as much as possible before proceeding so everyone is on the same page before any work commences.