While January 1^st is still a couple of months away, it’s been on my mind recently due to three important things that take place on that day, each of which has something to do, more or less, with the number 5:

On the first day of my favorite month, October, I shall be settled in at, and enjoying the atmosphere of, Boston Web Studio’s new office. You see, BWS is being relocated to the charming little city of Beverly—“the garden city,” “the official birthplace of America’s Navy,” and “hey, that’s also a girl’s name.”

Getting there, however, will be a long and terrifying northward journey over a Bermuda Triangle-like section of the North Atlantic Ocean. This fearful trek will take place over an impossibly long five mile stretch of land after leaving the safety and comfort of the Salem location and, with great despair, I must prepare for the inevitable and unavoidable casualties that will occur during this long and arduous journey. I dare say that if I am not careful, I could lose three to four iced coffees and a few hundred calories along the way.

As Boston Web Studio gains more traffic, more attention, and more referrals, the amount of project inquiries I receive increases proportionately. At the same time, and because of math and all of its wondrous properties, the amount of inquiries that I should politely decline increases as well.

While there are numerous reasons any given project should be declined, the one that’s been on my mind lately is that of being compared to another agency whose estimate is much lower than mine for the same work. As I’ll point out below, the term ‘same work’ is ambiguous and rarely means what it implies.

Seventeen months have passed since this website was last redesigned and, while there were a few attempts made in the meantime, this version—the sixth version—feels the most suitable. It started back in March of this year and, in what seems to be a welcome trend, very little time was spent in Photoshop; just enough to create the handful of images seen throughout the new design. Beyond that, Photoshop was only used for color-to-hex information, pixel-specific measurements, and the occasional 15-minute period when I just needed to see a spinning beach ball. Much of the remaining ‘design’ work was done while writing the HTML and CSS.