Q: How do you pronounce that?
A: It’s Akira… think Ah-Keer-Ah.
Q: Why did you name it that?
A: It’s my son’s middle name. It’s Japanese for “bright”. The Kanji that is used for the name is actually the combination of the two symbols for the sun and moon. My mother is japanese and we wanted to make sure that he always has a piece of that heritage with him. I also wanted to have some of that flavor with the business.
Q: How long have you been doing this?
A: I’ve been designing web pages professionally since 2004. I’d been doing it as a side hobby since around 1998. My professional background has been very design oriented, so it seemed like a natural transition. A lot of the same principals apply.
And many of them do not.
Q: How much will a web site cost me?
A: Honestly, that depends on a lot of things. How many pages do you want? What do you want them to do? Do you want to be able to update them yourself? This is just the beginning. I usually like to meet with someone before I quote them a price just to feel them out for what they want the site to be.
Q: I want my site to be at the top of the search engines, can you help me with that?
A: We don’t do search engine marketing per se. However, we do build our pages to be search engine friendly and do some very nifty things with CSS that’ll make it easier for you to rank higher. That said, good search engine marketing takes two things in fairly large quantities; money and time. We specialize in design, but can recommend a good internet marketing company to you should you desire their services.
If anyone promises you the top spot of Google or any other search engine, you should treat them like a snake oil salesman and get a money back guarantee.