Frequently Asked Questions

These are some of the questions we are most often asked by potential clients and weblog readers. The easy ones first I think:

Answers

What is a weblog

A weblog, or blog, is a website or part of a site which features regular posts or updates in reverse chronological order, often used as an online journal. That's nothing special in itself, as many magazine and news sites follow that format. The popularity of the term weblog was brought on by the rise of weblog applications which allowed anyone to create a site which they could update without specialist technical knowledge or expensive server space, such as LiveJournal or Blogger. Blog was chosen as 2004 word of the year.

Why is your weblog so prominant on your business site?

Firstly, because we are advocating the use of weblogs to promote musicians and artists. It seemed a little strange to not use such a powerful technique on our own site while tying to sell the concept to others.

Secondly, and more importantly, we actually do care about what we are writing. The blog is not just there for the sake of it. Our contributors are all passionate about writing, and many do so on their own personal weblogs, such as Andrew Hume at The Dredge, and UsableType.

What sort of weblog software or CMS do you use?

Our weblog is powered by Wordpress, which suits our needs perfectly. Our clients weblogs are powered by anything from Movable Type, to Text Pattern, depending on the requirements of the individual project.

Our secretary's husband's nephew said he can make a website for £100. Why are you so expensive?

One of the great things about the web is that anyone can publish pages with next to no knowledge of the medium. This is what led to the massive dot-com bubble in the mid 1990's. It is also the reason the dot-com bubble burst.

Sites by Artist Logs, and indeed any design agency, are planned, designed, re-designed, and implemented over the course of a number of weeks, sometimes months. The level of detail and experience we provide ensures that your site is developed exactly to your requirements, complies with accessiblity laws, and is built to the standards of the W3C.

What is the process of commissioning a site from you?

The initial step is for you to contact us with details of your proposed project. We will follow this up by sending a return email, setting up an account for you in our client section, and sending what we call an RFP (request for proposal) document.

The RFP document (normally in Word format) asks you some fairly general questions about how you want your site to work and feel, your goals for the project, and your budget.

Many people become a little over concerned about their answers at this stage, but believe us - nothing is set in stone. In fact, the RFP in many cases is a way of filtering out people who think they want a website, but aren't prepared to put detailed thought into its requirements. If preferred we can go through the process of filling in the RFP with you over the phone.

Once we have created and delivered a proposal, we await final approval from you before starting to plan and develop your site.

How does your accessiblity style switcher work?

Our style switcher is powered by a technique known as Invasion of the Body Switchers designed and created by Malarkey and Brothercake. Further information at A List Apart.