Brigette Zeiss's Review Sourced from Google
If you watch any car shows on Velocity, then you know it's a terrible idea to take a damaged car body and "fix" it with bondo -- bondo is not a fix, it's a gap filler. For years, we treated our Web site like that rusty old car that you just keep trying to make right with stop-gap solutions.
Like buying a rusted car in the first place, we made the bad investment to have a designer create a Flash Web site for us years ago. When we realized the extent of the problems created by Flash, we had to hire a new company to convert it back into HTML while keeping the look and feel of the Flash site -- this is where the problems came in. Like applying bondo rather than welding in new metal, we allowed the design company to apply temporary fixes and build a new site on pillars of sand -- and we did this for years until Angela, Cris, and Noble Intent Studio entered the picture.
We met Angela through the Nextdoor site as we kept crossing paths -- oddly, the first time we interacted was when she had a Blue Apron free meals offer, of all things. Then we'd see her posts about a local rescue that she worked with. When our shih tzus died, she enabled us to donate our gently used items to the rescue. And then she also made these cute little San Diego neighborhood maps that we bought. But it was the wonderful local reviews by neighbors that helped us know that hers was the right company to "overhaul" our junker!
From our first contact, Angela was dialed in on exactly what we wanted to do. She showed us what was wrong with our Web site -- for example, a prior designer had used images for our menu bar which caused the site to load slowly, it wasn't being indexed properly on Google, the design was confusing, we couldn't maintain it -- all stuff that we didn't want to (but needed to) hear. We had an already elderly and still rapidly aging Web presence.
Right away, Angela had great suggestions for what to do to clean things up, make it more maintainable and pleasing to the eye, and how to make it more user-friendly and optimized for search engine recognition. She also had wonderful ideas on how to make our form more streamlined so that users would fill it out more frequently. Not surprisingly, we decided to move forward with Noble Intent Studio based on this first meeting.
We felt terrible when it got ugly quickly -- our current designer and site host decided to have an absolute hissy fit about us not using him anymore; however, Angela's empathy and assistance made everything better immediately. The design process was a little rocky only because we were VERY tied to the look and feel of our old Web site -- which is probably why we used the bondo approach for years and years. Angela listened carefully and gently nudged us along in the right direction to improve usability. Once we agreed on the design, we were ready for Cris and the development team to do their behind-the-scenes magic and create the site.
Angela kept us in the loop frequently during the development process so that we always knew where our project stood. When our existing site broke temporarily, Cris got that fixed quickly despite it being after hours. Actually, now that I think about it, a lot of their work was done after hours which worked out great for preventing downtime and other issues that might occur during the business day.
They got our shiny new Web site done in record time and earlier than promised -- we love the updated look and feel, ease of updating, and improved usability. Throughout the process, Angela was patient and positive which was exactly the type of designer that we needed.
Yes, we were lucky enough to find Noble Intent Studio on Nextdoor, but we feel that it's important to share the wonderful work they're doing on Google as well -- they're also just truly good humans, which goes above and beyond business. Thank you again for your hard work on our behalf!
