4S Design Studio
Danville, California, United States
(1)
Danville, California, United States
(1)
4S Design Studio is a boutique design, development and content marketing agency in The San Francisco Bay Area.
Our team covers a lot of disciplines to meld design, development and content. In addition to the obvious tech side, we deal a lot in content strategy, copywriting, branding ideation, graphic design, photography, keyword research, SEO, paid search and social media, email campaigns and about a billion other things that pull the puzzle pieces together.
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1 customer review
Chris M.
I can't tell you how impressed I am with 4S Design Studio! Â I feared switching design companies because it seems every project is always accompanied by many hours of explanation and bumps in the road, etc. Â You know what I mean if you're a small business owner! Â Steve designed my site with so little effort on my part. Â He met with me at the spa, got a feel for who we are and our mission, took some photos, and BAM! Â A few days later he had a pretty great structure going! Â Just a few more tweaks and you'll have to check it out for yourself! Â Am I allowed to leave my website name? Joliesalonandspa. Upon finalization, we had a meeting to teach me how to edit the site by myself if desired. Â He's on top of SEO, continued support, and learning more about what makes my business tick to improve upon what I think is already an A+! Â I look forward to looking at our website every time now! Â 4S Design Studio has put the icing on the cake of why I'm so proud to own this spa. Â So very grateful. More...
Reviewed on Yelp
What makes a great website?
Bottom line, your website is only as good as its ability to create traffic and then convert that traffic into leads and ultimately, into revenue. The secondary mission is to have it look amazing while doing that but to be absolutely clear, that order should not be reversed. All too often, we see sites that have put a lot of time and energy into creating this visually stunning "look and feel" but neglected to zero in on what the end-goal was.
That's clearly a pretty broad stroke definition of a "great website" as each individual site is going to have its own set of goals, but we think this holds true for 95% of websites out there.
What questions might you ask a client when starting a new project?
We have a fairly extensive laundry list of onboarding questions we'll need to get through once a project gets underway. We make it as painless as possible.
Generally speaking, we want to ensure you have a clear definition of success and that we're all on the same page as far as how we're getting there. While we love getting "all creative and stuff", at the end of the day, our goal with any project is to be able to quantitatively show value for our work, not, "Hey, look how cool this looks". What we're looking to do is come back to each month and say, "We're trending on a X% month-over-month traffic increase, we're converting site visits to leads/sales at 13.5%, here's a breakdown of your search engine rankings for your top 25 keywords/search terms, here's where there's opportunity and this is what we're going to work on this month."
What do you love most about your job?
We just love working with people that love what they do and then delivering quantifiable results that exceed their expectations. We realize this sounds like a canned response to an interview question, but that's the honest answer. It's hard not to smile when you hear, "Holy crap... this is working great. What do you think we can do if we increase the budget to X?"
What inspired you to start your own business?
Me personally (Steve) - I had a decade-and-a-half corporate sales and marketing career with a Fortune 500 consumer products company (Stanley Black & Decker). I had worked there through college and was climbing the corporate ladder in a field that had nothing to do with my education (computer science) or passion. My wife and I were also in the family planning stages at that point and knew that my weekly routine of airports and hotel beds wasn't a good mix for our plan.
I love the path I took, especially with how it relates to 4S Design Studio. The background in sales & marketing, while not exclusive, is unique as it makes us marketers first. It also means I've gotten to work with everyone from the corporate behemoths to the mom-and-pop operations
Why should our clients choose you?
We're simple, enthusiastic people who strive really hard to become a part of your team. We passionately dive into projects, treating your business as if it were our own. You're not going to get bloated up-sells, locked into a contract you want no part of or wondering, "what happened to my web guy?"
We're transparent with our pricing. This is our first time on Bark, but we're 100% sure we're not going to be the cheapest option, though hopefully, we're not the most expensive either. Our baseline quotes are based on a $1000 project fee plus $250/page for scoped design and development work. Our hourly rate for ongoing content marketing initiatives, social media management, SEO, graphic design and other complimenting pieces is $75/hour and you'll find we're generous and extremely efficient with our time. We've never once had a client decrease their budget with us.
We don't pigeon-hole you into a WordPress theme. We're happy to work in WordPress if that's your preference, but in our experience, it VERY often not the best platform and we have other options for Content Management Systems (CMS's) that still allow you to make updates yourself, albeit with a much simpler interface.
