FAQ - Graphic Detail Ltd.

Call us: 09 418 3127

studio@graphicdetail.co.nz

Why can’t you build a site for me and I host it somewhere else?

There are lots of different hosting solutions out there from ‘cheap as chips’ overseas servers with little or no support through to more expensive local servers and some of those have little or no support. These are just hosting providers. We provide a total ‘managed hosting’ solution. To see the difference, consult the FAQ below this. We believe our hosting solution is better.

We made a decision some time ago to only build and host on our own server for these additional reasons:

Our servers are optimised for hosting the websites we build. Others aren’t.
We have wasted a lot of time in the past having to navigate our way through other hosting company’s back ends to get our websites installed and functioning. Some have had to have additional functionality added and going back and forward sorting this out with the hosting company’s support and explaining it to our client just takes up more time.
Often when something goes wrong we are involved in a ‘he said/she said’ situation and more time is wasted explaining to you what has gone wrong and getting changes made.

In short, it is best for you for us to manage the website and the local hosting solution and make it a fully ‘managed’ hosting solution.

How is ‘Managed Hosting’ different to normal hosting?

Normal hosting is when your website files sit on a server and load when someone types in your web address.
Backups of the website may be included in normal hosting or they may charge extra for it.

Managed hosting, specifically our managed hosting, is a bit more.
Hackers aren’t normally some kid trying to target you, they are usually bots that just look at websites, checking the versions of code that they contain and, if there is a known exploit for that code, they use this exploit to insert some of their own code. This code may take the site down, show some other content, redirect site visitors or some other function such as send thousands of SPAM emails. Most of the emails for Russian brides, Rolex watches or little blue pills come from hacked sites and these sites may still view as per normal. We have helped clients (new clients – their sites weren’t hacked while they were on our servers) who haven’t know their site has been hacked until they get a call from their Internet Service Provider saying their website is sending out 300,000 emails a day and if it isn’t fixed by 5pm they are taking the site down because their ISP will be blacklisted (think other ISPs not allowing their clients to visit the site) and getting off those sort of blacklists can take a long time and be quite expensive.

Back ups. This includes a virgin back up of the site when it goes live. It also includes a series of back ups at regular intervals. These are all important because sometimes, if a site is hacked, it goes unnoticed and therefore it is included in the backups. If that happens at least you have a virgin back up to put a version of your site back up immediately.
Updating WordPress, Theme, Plug Ins and Security Patches. Imagine your website is an integration of a base WordPress code, the theme and plugins (added functionality) and security. All these things have to work together for the website to function. Some are from third parties. Exploits are being discovered all the time as hackers find more creative ways to exploit known code or developers add some new functionality to their work. WordPress, theme and plugin developers then issue an update or a patch… often. So every month one of our team actually logs into the back end of your website and checks for updates. It’s relatively straight forward to update them but we factor in a bit more. Sometimes updates break things. WordPress rushes a quick fix and the developer of the plugin that controls displaying different products for different countries breaks. If we are aware of these compatibility issues then we may hold off running that update until WordPress issues a version that doesn’t have that problem or the developer of the plugin issues an update that caters for the new WordPress version. This is very important. Once any updates are run we check that there is nothing obvious to us going wrong on the home page.
Hosting Environment There are many types of hosting and they aren’t all the same. They could be a standalone dedicated server, a portion of a larger server and could be shared space with thousands of other sites. They may have hundreds of websites on the same servers.
Responsiveness Who can you contact if you need something done or if there is a problem. There is a big difference between having to fill out an online form that may be dealt with someone in a different time zone and being able to call us.

Why is local hosting important?

Three reasons:

Speed
Google
Access

There are some very cheap hosting services out there. Often not very well supported and normally on overseas servers. Part of Google’s rating of your website includes noting if your website is hosted within the same country as your business/domain name is registered. Opening websites from overseas is slower than local sites purely because of distance and international data link capacity. Also often our clients come to us because of frustration trying to get access to support for their hosting environment. When it comes to hosting you tend to get what you pay for.

No one would want to hack my website, would they?

Yes they would! Very few hacks are targeted at a particular site. Most are done by ‘hacker bots’. These are little applications (apps) that hackers create to exploit a weakness they have discovered in website code bases. Imagine that a weakness is discovered by a hacker or group of hackers in a version of a website code base, a plugin or even something in the basic html. A hacker may then write a hacker bot that will visit any website links it can find on websites it visits and simply searches for a website using that version of software, dives in and either exploits the weakness or reports back to the hacker bot’s creator that it has found a target. Annoying? Yes. Worth protecting against? Definitely!

I can buy my own domain name for $25-$60. Why do you charge $40+GST for initial registration and renewal.

Good question! You can register your own domain name for less than $40+GST and you are most welcome to do so. We charge the extra to cover the initial registration and admin work around monitoring renewal, invoicing and the actual registration and renewal process….and a little bit of peace of mind.

As well as collecting your information and inputting that with the domain name registration (plus separate technical and billing contact details) we also set up the DNS (Domain Name System) records to point the A Record to the server IP address. There is also some admin on the server side to prepare for the future incoming website ‘requests/calls’ (fancy term for what happens when someone types in your website address and hits return). Your domain is entered into our database for monitoring (bit of time here) and then details are entered into our accounts system (bit more time). We only use a reliable registrar. Not all registrars are user friendly and many put barriers in the way of redirecting your DNS A-Record away because they make their money from their hosting service. Getting through those barriers can take up to a couple of hours of calls and follow up over a period of time to get sorted.

A couple of months before your domain name is set for renewal we tag it and send an invoice to you. When we receive payment for the domain name we renew it. Confirming payment and then renewal also takes a bit of time. We have to invoice early and confirm payment because once a domain name is renewed we cannot get a refund should someone decide they no longer want the domain and not pay the account.

You are most welcome to register your own domain name. Once you have purchased it we will give you a server IP address (e.g. 192.168.0.72) and you can configure the A-Record within the DNS settings.

Some clients will find a cheaper register of domain names and that is fine as long as you can sort out the DNS Records on your own. We have also had some clients contact us, annoyed that their site is down, only to discover that they haven’t renewed their domain name and it has lapsed.

If you can configure the DNS record yourself and want to manage renewal yourself we are happy to supply you with a UDAI and you can migrate your domain name to another registrar.

Who owns the working files?

We do. What you pay us for is for our time, creativity and experience to create an end product for you whether that is a pdf, a jpeg, actual printed booklet, flyer, banner, etc. The files that we use to create those products with remain ours.

In almost all cases, the client owns the “final artwork”, but the designer retains ownership of the working design files and all non-final design drafts. And as any client who has requested to own all these “working files” knows, designers don’t easily give these rights up. Here’s why.

Most clients believe that the primary reason for wanting to retain design files is so that the client will have to keep going back to the designer for future work – in other words, money. This is certainly a factor, but not the primary reason. When a designer creates something it becomes their baby, they grow attached to it and want to see it grow up strong and healthy. So their urge to manage your brand’s future is because they now know it better than most and feel they can best produce future designs ‘on brand’. That’s a big factor, but there are legal reasons too.

There are licensing issues for the individual elements used in the document. Design files often contain illustrations, photos, fonts, and other design elements that the designer has either created or purchased the rights to use. The client may own the final artwork that was made with these pieces, but this does not entitle them to outright ownership of each element that went into that final artwork.

While this may seem questionable it’s actually quite helpful to the client. For example, when we design logotype using a $400 font family, our client doesn’t have to purchase said font in order to have the right to use that logo. But if we gave them working files, the client would then have to purchase a license to use that font family– adding higher costs to their project. The same goes for image based assets.

Beyond that, design files hold a designer’s trade secrets. Giving another designer working files is much the same as a food company giving Kraft the recipe for their delicious new cracker. And like a designer, you’ve probably spent years in your profession, testing methods and learning tricks to make that recipe a-maz-ing!

Maybe Kraft won’t steal your cracker recipe, but why would you want to risk it?

Why can’t we limit the amount of website changes we do to a certain number of minutes?

It’s uneconomical, too hard to administer, and at times, hard to estimate the time it will take to effect changes.

All of our time is tracked using a program called Toggl which records our time to the second. While doing your changes we cannot be spending extra time checking into Toggl to make sure that we do not exceed a certain amount of time. There is briefing and proofing time on top of the actual changes that are made by a developer before sending back to you.

If the developer stops at a set time or earlier, some of your tasks may only be half done and so if they save them, your site will be incomplete or maybe even appear broken. On the other hand, if they don’t save them then your time has been wasted on half a job that will then need to be finished. By the time we notify you that this hasn’t been completed, get the go ahead to continue, log back into the website and make the remaining changes, we have taken a lot more time than just getting it all done in one go. If a job is stopped at, say 15 minutes, then there is no time left for being passed back for proofing/checking, testing on different devices or browsers. We find even discussions about what we think can be done within a time limit occupies two of the team and some jobs can only be estimated by logging in and looking at the backend and this is before any work is done.

This is not economical for either of us.

Most of our clients are happy to send through their changes every month and we just do them. They trust us to be as efficient as possible and quickly get the job done. We would like to think your experience so far with us will give you some confidence in that. We are very focussed on clearing each job in the workflow as soon as we can.

If I am allocated 15 minutes of changes or support in my hosting plan and don’t use it can I use it the next month?

No, unfortunately the 15 minutes must be used within the calendar month. They do not roll over or accumulate.

Why can’t we always quote for a job you want done?

Some we can, some we can’t. These examples may help explain why:

• Want a 3.6m teardrop/swooper flag with your logo on it?
No worries, here is the quote.

• Want a 20cm x 20cm booklet designed and printed?
What is the content? What sort of layout? How many pages? Are you supplying images or are we sourcing? Copywriting? Will it come in all at once or drip fed content when it is ready? When your images arrive and they are too low res then there will be extra time communicating that with you, getting higher res images? ‘That’s the best I have got?’ – add some more time sending screenshots and examples of why the image may look okay on screen but will look quite crappy when printed. Want to just change ‘a bit’ of text once we have submitted for your approval? How long is a piece of string? Give us some of this info and we may be able to give a print price but design and admin could be really quick or take a bit longer but it’s totally dependant on where you may want to take it.

• Want a logo designed for a new business?
We can give an estimate to get you to the first stage where we’ll present you with some logo options based on a brief but from there on it is really up to you. You may pick one and say ‘That’s it! Perfect!’ or you may say we like the font of this one and the image from that one but would like to explore different colour combinations. Because the time taken will be determined by your direction we just charge for the amount of time it takes.

• Want booking functionality added to your website?
Hourly bookings? Multiple appointments for the same time? Multiple bookings for the same time with multiple people? Need it to intergrate with other software like a Google Calendar? Do you need questions answered with the booking? Do you want a payment gateway put in so payment is made at the time of booking? Lots of questions and then we won’t know about how it will integrate with the rest of your site until we jump into it. We can give an estimate but it may be quite wide.

For some web development we won’t know how long it will take until we are nearly finished with the job, since the developer has to dive into the code and figure out a way to make things happen. Even an hour into the job they don’t know how much longer, because they have built the functionality but something else in the site is stopping it running. Then 5 minutes later there is a break through, the mist clears and it’s done.

What are your Terms & Conditions for doing a website?

To view our full list of Terms & Conditions, please click here.

How do I contact Graphic Detail if my website needs urgent attention outside of business hours?

To contact us regarding urgent website matters please visit our After Hours page.
We will endeavour to address your request as soon as possible.