How do I prepare for my kickoff meeting with Simpatico?

Excellent question! We’ve written a blog post that includes all the things to think about and prepare for our first discovery meeting. Can’t wait to dive in!

How do you communicate with your clients?

We primarily use Basecamp and email for keeping track of project timelines, deliverables, and client feedback. You can read more about how we facilitate this process in this blog post by our product manager Mingwei, “How We Use Basecamp to Manage Projects.”

For larger engagements or for ongoing retainer clients, we’re down to create a cross-workspace Slack channel during the duration of the engagement.

Are you available for in-person meetings?

We’re a fully remote studio now, but the answer is yes (depending of course on COVID positivity rates and general safety). Tamara and Bruce (Simpatico’s Owner and Head of Design) are both based in the New York City metro area, and would be happy to meet in person as it makes sense.

Why is it so important to obtain a printing proof?

All printers print a little differently. If you’re printing a bulk order, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of obtaining a proof from your printer before fulfilling an order to ensure that your colors end up looking like you imagined.

Toto, we’re not in digital anymore.

How do I use Invision?

You can navigate through all of the pages using the arrow keys on your keyboard or the left/eight arrows that appear when you hover at the edges of your screen. You can also click the grid icon in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen for an overview of all available pages. To provide feedback, simply hit the ‘C’ key or click the speech bubble icon in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen to enter Comment Mode. You can then drop comments by clicking anywhere on the designs! Hit the ‘C’ key or the speech bubble icon again to exit Comment Mode.

If our site requires custom illustration, what’s the process look like for that?

To ensure our clients are satisfied with the final custom illustration deliverables, we follow a trusted 3-step process. Learn more about it here.

Do you build sites that are WCAG/ADA compliant?

The team here at Studio Simpatico (especially our Head of Development, Amber) believes strongly that an accessible internet is of utmost importance. We wrote this post about some of the best practices we support and implement on sites we build.

It’s worth noting a common misunderstanding around web accessibility, which is a lot of guidelines fall on design or content and not the development side of the house: things like color contrast, language related items, ensuring images have ALT tags, etc.

We absolutely try our best to keep up with and follow best practices; however, we’ve found many of the guidelines to be a little fuzzy and outdated (unsurprisingly, seeing how many were written decades ago). For clients concerned about WCAG and ADA, we always recommend hiring a third party to conduct a site audit. We’re then happy to address and remediate any findings or recommendations they have.

Is WordPress a secure choice?

This question comes up a lot. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world so it’s understandably also the most popular to try to hack. However, there are many good practices that you can and should follow that reduce your risk exponentially. The first is going with a great host like WP Engine. We’ve outlined many more in our blog post, “How Do I Prevent My WordPress Website From Getting Hacked?”

How do I use WordPress?

A great place to start is the WordPress Admin Walkthrough that our Head of Development Amber put together.

How do I export submissions out of Gravity Forms?

Gravity Forms makes it easy to export all of your form submissions. First, click on “Forms” from the left navigation of WordPress. Then, click on “Import/Export” underneath the main heading (still in the left nav). From there, you’ll be able to select your form, select the fields that you wish to include in your export, apply any filters (including date range) that you’d like, and click “Download Export File.” Voila! A CSV that includes all form submissions.

I’m getting a ton of spam via my contact form. Any tips?

In fact, yes! Check out this post by Amber about how to block WordPress spam.

How do I setup a Google Maps API key?

Someone at Simpatico has informed you that you need to set up a Google Maps API key. Admittedly, it requires a bit of a process, but thankfully Amber has put together this helpful guide to figuring things out.

Simpatico sent me changes to review but I’m not seeing them on the live site. Why is this?

You may need to do what’s called a hard refresh, which you can do by holding down the shift key and pressing the reload button. The need to hard refresh happens because when you visit any website, your computer downloads the CSS file (the stylesheet file that controls the site’s styles). When you return to that site, it’s actually your machine that loads your local file, rather than looking to the new file on the server. (Your browser is trying to be helpful and save time.) Once we go into production mode, we have a tool that will automatically cache bust every time we push updates to the stylesheet. This isn’t turned on until we go live — but we also won’t be pushing code on a regular basis, so it’s overall less of an issue.

Check out the following for more info:

How does the QA process work?

You’ll work in parallel with our team, testing and reporting bugs. Here are some tips we’ve put together for a seamless content and QA process.

What is the difference between a domain and hosting?

A domain is the address of your website: where your visitors can find you. Website hosting, on the other hand, is where your website files are physically stored.

What provider do you recommend for hosting?

We recommend our friends over at WP Engine for the reasons outlined in this blog post.

Do you offer maintenance plans?

We sure do — maintenance plans small and large! Most of our clients opt to stay on some sort of support plan after their site goes live. Learn more about our offerings here.

What’s the difference between a staging and production environment?

In this article, “Staging vs. Production Environments,” we discuss the two environments necessary for any web project: staging and production. We’ll cover what they are, how they differ from each other, and when you should use each one.

Client Frequently Asked Questions

Table of Contents

Discovery

Project Management

Design

Development & WordPress

QA & Launch

Post Launch